
Introducing the free Microsoft R Client - sinodin
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2016/07/microsoft-r-client.html
======
Hansi
I am no closed to understanding what this is. Everything listed here is
already part of Microsoft R Open and the client is just standard RGui:
[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-r/install-r-
clien...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-r/install-r-client-
windows)

~~~
blahi
The rx algorithms are not part of MSFT R Open, but they are severely
restricted in this, so I kinda fail to see the point of having it. Perhaps
someone from the team can chime in and explain the reasoning behind this?

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I'm guessing it is primarily aimed at getting people used to the
interfaces/differences/quirks of using RevoR scaler functions.

Will it do so? I dunno. I'm a fan of simplification. If it's resource limited
I'd argue there more motivation in just sticking with the popular base R
implementations and not over complicate things or tie your self to a
proprietary product. Sas also offers a kind of "free" version cut
down/restrictive, and I don't find I use that much either, because the
restrictions (virtual machine, non-EG interface) make me rarely ever want to
use it.

Both companies have the challenge of how to keep themselves relevant and reach
people to teach their wares in a world where they similarly try to restrict
access to their products. Revor has some advantage in this sphere, given the
availability and use of regular r,but there are implementation quirks and
rough edges around the fact that they're trying to get R to do some things it
really wasn't designed to do from the ground up.

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apathy
Christ almighty, why not just use SAS at that point. Ross Ihaka was so
disappointed by Revolution's value-subtracted offerings that he disowned the
entire R project.

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curiousgal
Isn't SAS better than R?

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GFK_of_xmaspast
I used SAS in graduate school and I don't ever want to touch it again.

~~~
_Wintermute
To be fair I use R every day and cannot wait for Julia or Python to catch up
so I can abandon the monstrosity.

~~~
apathy
You may be waiting for a while. The thing that R has going for it is
documentation. The thing it has going against it is the monstrosity of the
language implementation.

Julia is nice if you're coming from Matlab. And it sure as hell is more
efficient than R or Python. But the libraries just aren't there yet. I went to
implement dropout regularization a while back (a year or two ago?) and there
were just so many things that I take for granted in R and Python that were
completely missing. I mean, yeah it's fun to write your own SGD
implementation... Once... Per lifetime...

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blahi
Microsoft offers full featured and unrestricted developer edition or
Revolution R through their Dev Essentials program.

(don't change it MSFT, please!)

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smortaz
In case you use Visual Studio and want to write some R code, VS now has a
free+oss plug-in for it:

RTVS v0.4 video overview:
[https://youtu.be/k1_6XLyhHbo](https://youtu.be/k1_6XLyhHbo)

Docs: [http://microsoft.github.io/RTVS-docs/](http://microsoft.github.io/RTVS-
docs/)

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_Codemonkeyism
Reading the article, rx* feels to me like embrace and extend, or am I
misguided?

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data_spy
Microsoft was at the 2016 UseR conference, they're presentation 'How Microsoft
uses R presentation' was a complete sales pitch.

~~~
blahi
Uhm... it is meant to be? Oracle and Teradata did the same thing. They paid
for it.

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data_spy
The session was supposed to be how they use it not how other companies can use
it by paying for it

~~~
blahi
The session was called "R at Microsoft", not "How Microsoft uses R". You just
had the wrong expectations.

