If you regularly deal with problems related to Statistics and you haven’t even heard about R, then you’ve definitely committed a data sin. The R language has become a de facto standard among data analysts and miners for the development of statistical software.
R has many advantages such as that it’s free as in freedom and that you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available (read the popular New York Times article). R has its own conference, useR!, which in 2009 will be held at Rennes, France.
I’m a regulaR user since 2006, when I first discovered the power of R thRough “the R Book” by Michael Crawley. I wrote some code for a recent paper and right now I’m working on my first R package. Unfortunately, R is not at all popular in Greece, where (almost) everyone uses SPSS or other commercial software. R is mainstream but I think it’s here to stay.
So, don’t be lazy, try R and see for yourself if it fits your needs.
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