
Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language - fasteRstat
http://fasterstat.com
======
gerty
It's hard to compete with RStudio for best IDE for R. I stick with vim-R-
plugin for most stuff but RStudio is so helpful for making presentations. But
competition is good.

Excel add-on, on the other hand, seems very interesting. I lost lots of time
in Excel before I decided to get rid of it instead in favour of R+SQLite. I
wonder if it would be possible to make the add-on work under wine though.

Edit: just tried to get FasteR add-on under wine. Unfortunately, it requires
.NET 4.5 with which I didn't have much success previously...

~~~
trestletech
The latest RStudio preview release has Vim mode, if you're interested.

~~~
thalesmello
The Vim mode in RStudio is rather disappointing. Doesn't even have support for
macros.

~~~
jmcphers
It does now, in RStudio's public preview release:
[http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/02/23/rstudio-0-99-preview-
vim-...](http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/02/23/rstudio-0-99-preview-vim-mode-
improvements/)

------
jebus989
Making R available from Excel seems a good idea to ease the transition for
newbies (like R commander) but what advantages does the standalone IDE have
over RStudio or the default R.app?

Edit: actually I managed to click through to find this screenshot:
[http://fasterstat.com/Images/Desktop/12_R_gui.png](http://fasterstat.com/Images/Desktop/12_R_gui.png)
which looks novel (can't currently watch the video unfortunately)

~~~
Blahah
A major use-case for Excel integration is in finance, where a vast number of
analysts - not newbies in any meaningful sense - work in Excel. Giving them
access to the power of R from within a familiar environment is a great thing.

Recommendation for the developer (if you're not doing this already): market
hard to finance businesses. You'll make a killing.

~~~
baldfat
Term newbies in R was what the poster before stated.

Personally I would NOT want to have anyone use R with a spreadsheet program.

1) I want manipulated data that is clear to replicate

2) I want my output to be plots and reports not another spreadsheet

~~~
Mikeb85
> 2) I want my output to be plots and reports not another spreadsheet

Knitr for the win! Seriously great package (and integrated nicely into R
Studio), I use it for all my reports, presentations, etc...

~~~
peatmoss
I'm finding myself loving org-babel more and more. I also love knitr, but in
comparison org-babel:

\- Works with just about any language you can imagine, not just R or the few
other hypothetically supported languages

\- Allows me to write in a lightweight Markdown-comparable, LaTeX-augmentable
syntax, except org-mode supports internal references.

\- Lets you do truly obscene things like pass values from bash, to python, to
julia, to R

As Emacs begins to move more and more to Guile, I hope that the org-*
functionality can be instrumented as embeddable libraries. I understand that
Emacs isn't for everyone, and thus I wish org-mode (the format) and org-babel
were available to the rest of the world. I was surprised to find how few edge-
cases aren't better handled by org-* than knitr / RMarkdown.

------
vkr
What happens when you just download FasteR? Does it work for a limited period
and then stop working, will it ask me for a license each time I start it?

Also, why would I pay €399 for FasteR while its main competitor is more mature
and completely free? Aside from Excel add-in, the two other reasons I've found
are in the comments here: "graphical user interface for selected
packages/functions, support for multiple monitors". Am I missing something?

~~~
fasteRstat
Current version of software show you info about licensing options (if you have
it without license ID).

399 is for both editions of software for next two years. There are multiple
reasons not only two... Mainly the GUI, but this is not in current 0.4.1
version available in the form as I imagine. I only follow the advice: Release
something before you are satisfied.

------
fasteRstat
Thank you for all the valuable comments and emails. Typo errors I have
corrected.

\- I think that developing software for “Windows only” is not a mistake. If
you make the first version with a small team or in one person, it removes a
lot of compatibility issues and problems. If the software will be successful
on Windows, it can be extended to other platforms. \- "It's hard to compete
with R Studio" \- yes it is true. Therefore, it is necessary to go a little
different path. This will be visible later, after several iterations. It is
now difficult to compare the first public version of FasteR with mature R
Studio. But competition is always a good think. \- "Excel is bad" \- According
to statistics here is a 750M of Excel users. Every statistician knows about
problems of Excel (or all spreadsheet tools). On the other hand, it is
standard in a number of areas. If you look around (not only in the community
of developers and designers) you will find that with Excel spreadsheets works
tremendous amount of companies and institutions, particularly because of its
simplicity. For some issues is not sufficient and here is it possible to use
for example the integration with FasteR.

------
DonHopkins
Beware the IDEs of March!

~~~
mwexler
Oy. And yet, I couldn't stop myself from upvoting this comment. You made this
day a touch better.

------
healthisevil
Interesting product. However, you should get a native English speaker to fix
the grammar and spelling on your web site.

~~~
DonHopkins
At least they didn't spell it "FastR".

------
ekianjo
Windows only ? Meh. And integrating with Excel is completely useless (and
meaningless, since you don't need to use a spreadsheet representation to work
with data when you think in R), R beats Excel for about everything once you
are used to it.

~~~
vkr
I was also looking for an OS X / Linux version. The website doesn't mention
being Windows only, will other operating systems be supported in the future?

~~~
Robadob
Website lists .net framework 4.5 as a requirement, so that seems unlikely.

~~~
ekianjo
I wonder why more people don't build tools with cross platform in mind in this
time and age.

------
smartera
You mention "For using FasteR you need fit only several conditions", while
it's only Windows and .Net. "Several" makes it sounds like a difficult
installation and may prohibit some novices to install it.

------
bencollier49
And yet they keep that butt-ugly logo. Is it an in-joke, or something?

~~~
Blahah
It actually kind of is. GNU logos are consistently incredibly ugly and show
utter disdain for, or lack of awareness of, graphical design [0].

It could be almost like a philosophical point: "GNU software is utilitarian.
We don't waste time on fancy graphics". Or it could be that GNU developers
tend to be... developers. No designers in sight, and no appreciation for
visual aesthetics.

0: [https://www.gnu.org/graphics/package-
logos.html](https://www.gnu.org/graphics/package-logos.html)

~~~
ekianjo
> GNU logos are consistently incredibly ugly

True, but since it's Free Software you can release a version of the same code
by yourself with a better logo. Nobody prevents you from changing anything,
that's what's beautiful with GNU tools.

------
bobcostas55
I love, love, love the excel integration. Fantastic.

I urge you to make a Chocolatey package to make updating easy.

There's also a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of usability. e.g. the
objects browser should automatically refresh when you "transfer data". Also
I'd love to be able to make "transfer data" use a data.table instead of
data.frame.

Killing the R process then hitting refresh on the object browser results in a
crash.

------
Mikeb85
This has been done before. An R Gnumeric plugin is a thing, and there's been
Excel plugins before as well.

I personally use R Studio and see no reason why I'd prefer a spreadsheet, R
Studio does let you see a table representation of data anyway, and can very
easily import spreadsheets and manipulate them.

------
nickysielicki
You really can't be bothered to at least `aspell` your website?

------
coob
Have passed this along to a couple of PhD student friends who'll I'm sure will
find it useful.

Quick typo check: 'univerties' under Licensing

~~~
qooleot
A second typo:

"This tools hepls"

------
sean_the_geek
Interesting indeed! especially the Excel part!

------
sunilkumarc
Is the FasteR IDE or any other equivalent command line utility available for
Linux distributions ?

~~~
fasteRstat
FasteR is available only for Windows. But for Linux you can use for example R
Studio (mature tool compared to FasteR).

------
amelius
I don't understand why people would want to do mathematics in imperative
languages.

(Yes, I understand imperative languages are faster, but why not just keep the
imperative parts for the "inner loops", nicely isolated, and a functional core
for everything else?)

~~~
dbaupp
Unfortunately, the R language isn't fast, especially not the imperative
features (loops). A language like Julia is a better bet in that respect.

The drawcard of R is the breadth of specialised statistical packages. (Often
with inner loops written in C for performance.)

~~~
baldfat
in R loops are generally frown upon due to this issue.

BUT R is not slow when it comes to parallel processing or using Revolution
Anayltics also has speed ups if you need it. R also has dplyr is speedy and
the data.tables is even faster. I think the original Julia speed claims were a
little biased to Julia and well there is plenty of awesome things about R, but
"slow" isn't a far statement. There is a reason why R has grown so much.

Interesting argument for R usage:
[https://matloff.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/r-beats-python-r-
be...](https://matloff.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/r-beats-python-r-beats-julia-
anyone-else-wanna-challenge-r/)

~~~
grayclhn
"R is slow" refers to the main implementation of the language --- to code
written in R --- and is completely fair. The packages you're talking about are
mostly written in C or C++ with nice R interfaces. So R _as a statistical
package_ or R _from a user 's perspective_ is often quite fast, but that's
because it is relatively easy to interface with C and C++.

(This comes up often, and I'm not sure why I'm compelled to reply today, but
there it is.)

~~~
baldfat
But MANY programming languages work this way. I would say that coding in R it
doesn't matter if it is C or Fortan why say programming in R is slow even
though in practice it really isn't with some new solutions?

~~~
grayclhn
Many languages are slow. (Or, more concretely, many languages have only slow
implementations.) If C or Fortran interfaces are easy, speeding up the
language shouldn't necessarily be a priority. But that doesn't make the
language itself fast.

As for why this can matter: a big part of my job is designing and prototyping
new statistical estimators. "Prototyping" means running them through lots of
simulations to explore their properties in small samples. My two options in R
are:

1\. Program up the estimator in pure R, in which case the simulations can take
days to weeks to complete.

2\. Program up the estimator in C and write an R interface, in which case the
simulations will run 10 to 100 times faster. (Depending on the exact
operations used.) The code will take much longer to adjust if I need to change
the estimator, which happens frequently, and debugging will take longer.

3\. Program up the estimator and simulations in pure C, making it still faster
but much more brittle.

This is a fairly iterative process -- I'll typically discover errors in the
math as I run the simulations or after I've run them, or the simulations will
reveal unappealing properties that need to be fixed. But once I have "good"
estimator and "good" simulations, I write it up in a paper and am done with
it. (Gross simplification of my actual job, but accurate enough.)

So the distinction between "R's speed" and "C's speed" very much matters, and
if R were actually as fast as C it would make my life much easier.

Of course, for people who are "coding in R" by running data analysis in a
script the distinction doesn't matter. But I already said that in the comment
you're replying to.

~~~
baldfat
Thank you for actually replying and clarifying your statement, I enjoy
learning different ways of thinking. I guess I am changing my word for R to
"Fast Enough for Me." I can run my scripts in under 20 seconds, but a few
years ago it could be 2 or 3 minutes.

------
sebastianavina
Good ide

------
blawa
Thank you for making it free for non-commercial use! This is very useful.

------
sunilkumarc
Are there any ideas on making it opensource ?

~~~
fasteRstat
Yes, in the case of fail as startup :)

------
knowbody
Are people still using windows?

~~~
fsloth
[http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-
share....](http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-
share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0)

As do I. It serves as a fine basic computational substrate for the kind of
stuff I do, mostly hassle free.

------
anacleto
I'm not a big fan of Excel as IDE for R.

~~~
baldfat
So down vote when someone says. I am not a fan of Excel? I can list several.

1) Excel your end result can not be replicated

2) Excel use in most shops use macros extensively and it is easy to not have
your Excel environment available

3) The graphing capabilities of Excel is the reason why people still use pie
charts

4) When doing analysis you want everything scripted? Excel as part of the tool
chain is not something scriptable.

5) People usually have bad workflows with Excel and it takes learning R or
Padas or Matlab or another statistics language to leave their current mindset

6) I can't think of one added benefit for having Excel as part of a good
practice workflow unless you are mandated to produce some Excel spreadsheets
which R can also do without touching Excel

I could keep going on....

