In a tongue-in-cheek post at the Information Management blog, Steve Miller shares his "frustration" with R: package developers keep on releasing new functionality for R that makes his own work obsolete. For example, there's now pre-packaged functionality in R for enhanced dotplots, Economist-style graphics, additive regression models and more, which all obviate the need for Steve to implement such things himself. Steve reveals his agenda in the last paragraph:
Of course, my tongue-in-cheek observations are in fact a celebration of R rather than a critique. I'm continually amazed at the ever-expanding bounty of contributions from some of the top quantitative analysts in the world. With this wealth of goodies, though, comes an admonition from the old buy versus build conundrum: do your research on what's already available before you invest a lot of time developing from scratch. Often as not, what you're looking to do is already out there – for free. I need to practice that lesson even as I preach it.
Check out Steve's full post at the link below.
Information Management (Steve Miller): Frustrations With R?
Economist style graphics are not always a plus! See eg http://media.economist.com/images/20090124/CSR658.gif
Posted by: Xi'an | August 24, 2011 at 04:51