Re: Re: [babel] R questions

[Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk>]

Sébastien Vauban <wxhgmqzgwmuf@spammotel.com> writes:

> Hi Dan and Eric,
>
> I have a side question, but I think this is of general interest for others as
> well.
>
> I almost don't know GnuPlot neither R -- yes, before seeing the light, I used
> Excel for all my graphs.
>
> So, my question is: for typical small plots (piecharts and barplots), is there
> any Org-babel reason that would advocate for doing it in one of the two above
> language preferably than in the other one?

> Reasons could be better integration (for editing or (re-)generating the
> graphs), simpler semantics (with NA values, for example), etc.

Org-babel wants to support both languages as well as possible. So there
is no such purely org-babel reason; or if there is, there shouldn't be,
so tell us about it and we'll try to fix it.

With respect to graphics, I'm sure that each one has things it can do
better than the other (e.g. I get the impression that gnuplot is better
for "3D" graphics).

But yes, if there was someone who (a) didn't know either language, and
(b) were limited in the amount of time they could devote to learning
computer languages, and (c) thought they might one day have some use for
some of the things that R can do and gnuplot can't, then I would suggest
that they start using R over gnuplot.

R is a fully-featured programming language with a very large amount of
numerical/statistical/scientific procedures available. (2094 add-on
packages currently listed at http://cran.r-project.org/). One wouldn't
normally compare R with gnuplot; more appropriate comparisons might be
to the scientific libraries for python, perl and C++, and to things like
Excel, SAS, and Matlab, Mathematica (although R is not a symbolic
mathematics engine).

Dan

>
>
> Best regards,
>   Seb