Re: Status?

On Tue 2002-08-06 (14:37), John Fox wrote:
> I've spoken over the past couple of months to several individuals who, like 
> myself, have more or less left Lisp-stat for R. 

I plead guilty too.

> There are several obvious 
> reasons for doing so: Lisp-stat seems moribund, while R is alive and well; 

agreed,

> there is a very wide and growing range of statistical applications 
> available for R; 

definitely.

> R has standards for data sets, models, documentation, 
> etc.; 

indeed,

> and (perhaps more controversially) the S programming language is 
> easier to use than Lisp.

nope.

> 
> Nevertheless, everyone to whom I've talked regrets losing some of the 
> functionality of Lisp-stat, including the ability to draw dynamic, linked 
> graphs, and the built-in facilities for constructing graphical interfaces.
> 
> Although I don't have the technical expertise either to answer the 
> following question or, certainly, to implement a solution, I wonder whether 
> it would be possible to incorporate the Lisp-stat graphics and GUI-building 
> capabilities into R, ideally in the form of an add-on package that would 
> work in all three supported environments -- Windows, Mac, and Linux/Unix. 

As for graphical interfaces, there is tkwidgets in R, which is reasonably
cross-platform. In the next version of R, at least the core functionality
for dynamic graphs is provided. If I understood a talk by Kurt Hornik right,
that is. More than one single graph at a time will be possible, event-based
programming for graphs, and the like. We are not to expect all the 
desiderata will be there in 1.6, but the major obstacles to implementing
them will be removed.

My overall mood is applause for the R crew -- they got many things right
-- rather than mourning for the XLispStat development. R is gaining 
momentum at a stunning rate, and it is arguably becoming the statistical
package of choice not only in the free software market. Of course we'd
have liked MIT win over New Jersey, but it is good to see there is one
package that develops so nicely.

Greetings


Johannes