Ah. Let the language wars begin. Although I agree that going with R is basically a sad mistake
http://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php?vol=13 giving up on R/S is no longer an option, I hope. Too much investment from the community. Reculer pour mieux sauter, indeed. On Oct 19, 2005, at 3:43 PM, Jeffrey J. Hallman wrote: > If you're looking for a GUI toolkit that: > > 1. Is cross-platform, > 2. Has a good collection of widgets that look good on all > platforms, and > 3. Is easy to work with from R > > then it is hopeless. There is no such toolkit. > > As one poster mentioned, most of the better GUI toolkits are very > object-oriented, because that paradigm is a good fit for GUI > programming. > There are a few programming environments out there that do have > nice GUI > abilities, but they all use base languages that are not very R- > like, and so > the potential R GUI programmer is faced with having to use two very > different > languages for his creation. And even if that obstacle is > surmounted, there > remains the difficulty of trying to package up his work in such a > way as to > make it easily installed by others. Things are always breaking in the > interfaces between R and whatever you're using. Trying to keep it > all running > and packaging it for deployment are thankless, gargantuan tasks. > > There is a better way, and that is to give up on R. Start over with > a better programming environment, one that is object oriented, as > flexible and > dynamic as R, is cross platform, easy to program in, and has decent > GUI > facilities already. Then port the stuff in R that does statistical > programming, and you have the best of all worlds. > > The environment I am thinking about is VisualWorks Smalltalk, which > is free > for noncommercial use. As a language, Smalltalk is both simpler > and more > powerful than R, and the VM it runs on is much faster than the R > interpreter. > It has superior garbage collection and the best IDE in the business. > Callouts to C are just as easy as they are in R, but would likely > not be > needed as often due to the faster VM and much better programming > facilities. > Interfaces to various databases are possible, and the most powerful > web > toolkit (Seaside) is written in Smalltalk and runs under VisualWorks. > > There are a couple of other Smalltalk environments around that > could also be > considered. Squeak is an open source cross-platform Smalltalk that > is not as > fast as VisualWorks, but still must faster and more robust than the R > interpreter. Smalltalk/X is another possibility, though it works > only on > Windows and Unix. > > Think about it. Once you have a basic math package that can handle > matrix > programming and various mathematical functions, building the various > statistical modeling tools on top of them is not that hard. What > makes S and > R so much better than SAS is their programmability. Smalltalk is > like that, > only better. > > > Jeff Hallman > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
