

A big list of the things R can do - chrishan
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/07/a-big-list-of-the-things-r-can-do.html

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mbq
This is rather a short list hiding open alternatives to Revo works; the better
idea is to read CRAN task views <http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/>

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disgruntledphd2
Yes, it is. David Smith is a great blogger (and wrote the original ESS and a
first draft of an Introduction to R), but he's somewhat hamstrung by the
nature of his job. That being said, the Task views are not a friendly
interface unless you're familiar with the material already (i.e. by having
used psychometrics or something before).

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mvzink
R has frequently been a source of inspiration for me. (I mention his briefly
here: <http://mvz.so/articles/lend-a-hand-to-science.html>) It appears, to me,
as an example of a tool that has done and continues to do its job, for the
benefit of all mankind. This isn't to say it couldn't have been done better,
but I'm consistently impressed by the wide-ranging use and love that R finds
in so many fields, and by the breadth of people who use it, most of whom would
never call themselves programmers. I can't figure out what exactly R got
right, but I often think it has something to do with the fact that it was
created by someone who called himself a statistician, not a programmer.

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emmelaich
This is off topic but why do tools built for large scale analytics or
distributed processing have to be so slow at small scale / at the low end.

e.g. R, Erlang, Hadoop.

Feel free to ignore me but please don't downvote without comment :-)

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omni
Slightly OT, but I wouldn't say that R was "built for large scale analytics."
You have to go through some serious hoops to work on anything in R that takes
up more than 50% or so of available RAM. Revolution Analytics's R build is
designed for it, and some standalone packages like bigmemory can make R work
better with large data sets, but vanilla R is awful for the task.

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larrydag
Here is a big list of R links. Perhaps this gives a better idea of what R can
do.
[https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioconductor/2010-June/033791...](https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioconductor/2010-June/033791.html)

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big_data
R is a great language, with lots of features and applications without the
incremental stuff added by Revo. Their 'Big Data' stuff isn't for everyone.

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countessa
This is great thanks - I've got a book on R that a friend found at their work
and gave to me. Been meaning to dip into it for a while now.

