21 Oct 2010 nutella   » (Master)

Yikes, is it nearly a year since my last post? I have been reading and enjoying Advogato on an almost daily basis but haven't had the time or inclination to write. My personal life has been way more interesting than it has been for a long time, so I'll see how it all works out.

This post was partly provoked by a previous entry by someone talking about R, which I have now been using regularly for over six months. I'm still using MATLAB and Mathematica, but R has all that Free Software goodness, which means I can just send the scripts to my colleagues and let them play. The other person's post was about graphics, and I believe that they were using the lattice/trellis form. That's overkill for my needs. However, one glitch I have encountered is with split.screen() as multiple runs of the script with different row and column values causes problems and I can't find where the persistent value is stored. Things I don't particularly like about R are the sparse documentation and poor examples (better than nothing) and that the language is big and doesn't follow the principle of Least Surprises (I am reduced to web searches for capabilities). One thing I do like is the Tinn-R editor.

The other provocation for this post was this XKCD gem.

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