I'll expand my statement slightly.
Yes, Peter, you are the archetypical
stuffy professor. The truth hurts.
By any reasonable metric that I've
thought of my company name is at least
one-third "statistics", from which a
common (and I think correct) inference
would be that I'm not anti-statistics.
There are two aspects of why I think
that R should not be called a statistical
program: marketing and reality.
Marketing
Identifying with the most dreaded experience
in university is not so good for "sales".
(Reducing stuffiness might reduce the root
problem here.)
Reality
R really is used for more than statistics.
Almost all of my use of R is outside the
realm of statistics. Maybe the field of
statistics should have claim on a lot of
that, but as of now that isn't the case.
A Fusion
R's real competition is not SAS or SPSS, but
Excel. As Brian has pointed out before,
the vast majority of statistics is actually
done in Excel. Is Excel a statistics program?
I don't think many people think that -- neither
statisticians nor non-statisticians.
Pat
On 21/06/2010 10:32, Joris Meys wrote:
On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Patrick Burns
<pbu...@pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
(Statistics is what stuffy professors
do, I just look at my data and try to
figure out what it means.)
Often those stuffy professors have a reason to do so. When they want
an objective view on the data for example, or an objective measure of
the significance of a hypothesis. But you're right, who cares about
objectiveness these days? It doesn't sell you a paper, does it?
Cheers
Joris
--
Patrick Burns
pbu...@pburns.seanet.com
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of 'Some hints for the R beginner'
and 'The R Inferno')
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