Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

by fasteRstat • 11 years ago

122 66 11 years ago

jebus9892• 11 years ago

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 which looks novel (can't currently watch the video unfortunately)

fasteRstat6• 11 years ago

graphical user interface for selected packages/functions, support for multiple monitors,...

jebus9892• 11 years ago

Both sound good, maybe you could highlight these on your landing page? The picker for RColorBrewer palettes looks particularly handy!

Blahah2• 11 years ago

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.

baldfat5• 11 years ago

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

Mikeb855• 11 years ago

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.

R and Excel integration already exists: http://www.r-bloggers.com/a-million-ways-to-connect-r-and-ex...

Not that I think it's a good idea. Also, R is already a thing in Finance, quite a few job postings list it as a useful skill, and Linkedin has R/Finance groups.

Anyhow, it's much easier to manipulate data with scripts than spreadsheets, especially with R packages like quantmod. Looking at giant spreadsheets makes my eyes bleed and my head hurt, plus I think R Studio makes more sense for newbies to R anyway (and R Studio Server is fantastic for businesses).

anacleto2• 11 years ago

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

blawa2• 11 years ago

Really constructive comment- and it was very easy to guess the 9 points you wanted to mention why it's not a good choice.

anacleto2• 11 years ago

I used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks.

Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. The problems I encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas:

[1] Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly.

[2] Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses.

[3] Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns.

[4] Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished.

'Here’s an example of how the numerical inaccuracies in Excel can get you into trouble.'

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelr...

As someone previously mentioned here 'RStudio' is great. I would also add R-Project for Linux distribution.

Excel is a wonderful tool for many things. Statistics is not among them.

P.S. Happened a couple of times that articles posted on 'Journal of Econometrics' was denied (even by college students) for errors due to Excel.

baldfat5• 11 years ago

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....

gerty• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

thalesmello• 11 years ago

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

blawa2• 11 years ago

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

sunilkumarc2• 11 years ago

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

fasteRstat6• 11 years ago

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

sunilkumarc2• 11 years ago

Are there any ideas on making it opensource ?

fasteRstat6• 11 years ago

Yes, in the case of fail as startup :)

smartera• 11 years ago

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.

coob• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

A second typo:

"This tools hepls"

bencollier493• 11 years ago

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

Blahah2• 11 years ago

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

ekianjo3• 11 years ago

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.

bencollier493• 11 years ago

And these aren't just developers. They're also *statisticians".

bencollier493• 11 years ago

I really miss the old Python snake logo.

knowbody• 11 years ago

Are people still using windows?

fsloth• 11 years ago

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

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

healthisevil• 11 years ago

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

DonHopkins2• 11 years ago

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

DonHopkins2• 11 years ago

Beware the IDEs of March!

mwexler• 11 years ago

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

sean_the_geek• 11 years ago

Interesting indeed! especially the Excel part!

amelius• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.)

baldfat5• 11 years ago

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...

Mikeb855• 11 years ago

R is slow if you try to use it like an imperative language. If you use it idiomatically, it's quite fast. If all the intensive data-processing calls functions written in C/Fortran, it's very fast. And of course, you can use R for parallel processing, or in a cluster...

Julia as a language is faster, but I'm not sure it's actually faster than R to process data if you're using R as most people do...

tormeh• 11 years ago

They're easier and faster to develop in. Remember that the scripts usually only need to be run once - maintainability is irrelevant.

I don't think this all of the difficulty is intrinsic to FP, but FP language designers don't usually care about newbie-friendliness. The closest thing to a user-friendly FP language I know about is Scala, and it, too, has lots and lots of arbitrary symbols and hideously complicated function signatures.

Remember, the typical scientist has no patience for monads, currying, inscrutable value names or functions-as-arguments and compiler complaints about function signatures are more likely to instill deep hatred than anything else.

I know it's an extreme example, but a statistician will never try to understand what something like "def map[B, That](f: A => B)(implicit bf: CanBuildFrom[Repr, B, That]): That" means, he'll just move on to a language that's easier.

louden• 11 years ago

R does support functional programming. In fact, it was based on Scheme (see discussion for comparison: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2008-December/181982.h...).

dagw• 11 years ago

R is, at its core, a functional language with a bunch of largely optional imperative bits bolted on.

sooheon• 11 years ago

One of R's great current evangelists, Hadley Wickham, is taking it back to its functional roots[1](http://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/introdu...) as well.

Mikeb855• 11 years ago

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

R isn't exactly what I'd call your typical imperative language. It's more like the love child of APL and Scheme, with random bits thrown in by a bunch of statisticians.

Loops are almost never used in R, since pretty much everything is a vector (or some sort of data structure made of vectors), you simply apply functions to vectors and it maps over the whole thing.

Of course, the C, C++ and Fortran bits are 'imperative', which is kind of the structure you describe anyway (functional, vectorized R language which calls down to a bunch of C/Fortran functions).

ekianjo3• 11 years ago

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.

vkr3• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

vkr3• 11 years ago

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?

fasteRstat6• 11 years ago

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.

bobcostas55• 11 years ago

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.

nickysielicki• 11 years ago

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

Mikeb855• 11 years ago

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.

sebastianavina• 11 years ago

Good ide

fasteRstat6• 11 years ago

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.

Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

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