Thursday, January 8, 2009

Pirates' Favorite Programming Language?

R! For those of you who haven't seen, here's the latest nod to the popularity of R--by the New York Times. My favorite part of the article is the Cheney-style defense of SAS, relying on shoddy logic and shameless scare tactics (so 2008!). Also noted: while coding mistakes by evolutionary biologists are unlikely to kill anyone, loss of any customers does siphon off cash from the SAS Institute.

Yes, it's been quiet around here, mainly because everyone is shooting for the January 9th NSF deadline.


3 comments:

Glor said...

Word on the January 9 comment - tomorrow is G-Day!

Liam Revell said...

The SAS representative also misrepresents 'R' calling it "freeware" (implying proprietary software distributed with an optional fee, i.e., freeware), rather than "free software" which is distributed freely with its source code and thus can (in principle) be scrutinized, modified, and improved by a very large community of users and programmers. Many people know that such free software (e.g., Linux) often outperform propietary equivalents (regardless of whether or not they are distributed for a fee).

Susan Perkins said...

RRRRRR indeed! My proposal(s) are both almost ready to go I think!