Hi all, I've been reading your suggestions and I'd like to share my thoghts, which might be common to people not so deeply involved in the development of R.
One of the advantages of R is that it's an open source software, meaning that anyone can peruse the code for whatever purpose they might have. In R this is also true with contributed packages. However, for novices (like me) R is terribly overwhelming and although I suspect there are excellent professionals in their development, I really don't know how skilled the person behind a certain package is, both in his discipline and in coding in R. Since it won't be short until I can understand complex R functions, in the meantime I'd find a third-party review of the package useful. So I download a package and know that at least someone else has taken a look at it and vouches for its correct functioning or alerts of errors in certain points. An alternative would be not to use R until I get to understand the code and make sure it does what I expect, whereas I use another software to solve my problems. In many cases this could mean setting R apart for good. Also this is not a minor point if R is expected to spread at the corporate level. Users need some level of assurance that what they use is reliable, if not able to check the code in their own (having the code available is indeed very useful, but not enough in all cases). As for who should do the review, I wouldn't trust so much any user as I would an organization such as the JSS. If the latter is not possible, the first alternative is better than nothing. Best regards, ----- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Diego Mazzeo Actuarial Science Student Facultad de Ciencias Económicas Universidad de Buenos Aires Buenos Aires, Argentina -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Packages---a-great-resource%2C-but-hard-to-find-the-right-one-tf4855917.html#a13937354 Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
