7 ms·

Show HN: New IDE and GUI for R language

122 points by fasteRstat 12y ago

jebus989 12y 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 http://fasterstat.com/Images/Desktop/12_R_gui.png which looks novel (can't currently watch the video unfortunately)
- fasteRstat 12y ago
  graphical user interface for selected packages/functions, support for multiple monitors,...
  - jebus989 12y ago
    Both sound good, maybe you could highlight these on your landing page? The picker for RColorBrewer palettes looks particularly handy!
    - fasteRstat 12y ago
      Yes you're right. It's the plane.
      - melling 12y ago
        Typos on page: univerties FasteR - desctop application This tools hepls or as [an] application
        jamessb 12y ago
        There are several other typos which, whilst trivial, are quite jarring: http://fasterstat.com/Product http://fasterstat.com/Product produsing -> producing poverfull -> powerful http://fasterstat.com/ http://fasterstat.com/ anoher -> another There is also inconsistent use of 'Addin' and 'Add-In'.
        vkr 12y ago
        The video presents version 1.4.1 (last 10 seconds of the video), the website only lists version 0.4.1. I assume you changed the version number after finishing the video? It was hard/impossible for me to read the R code in the video while playing it at 1080p.
- Blahah 12y 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.
  - baldfat 12y 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
    - jackmaney 12y ago
      Agreed. 99% of the time, I only use Excel as a CSV viewer (and it's a rather clunky and error-prone CSV viewer at that).
    - Mikeb85 12y ago
      > 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 12y ago
        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.
anacleto 12y ago
I'm not a big fan of Excel as IDE for R.
- blawa 12y 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.
  - anacleto 12y 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/excelreg.pdf 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.
- baldfat 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  The latest RStudio preview release has Vim mode, if you're interested.
  - thalesmello 12y ago
    The Vim mode in RStudio is rather disappointing. Doesn't even have support for macros.
    - jmcphers 12y ago
      It does now, in RStudio's public preview release: http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/02/23/rstudio-0-99-preview-vim-mode-improvements/ http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/02/23/rstudio-0-99-preview-vim-...
blawa 12y ago
Thank you for making it free for non-commercial use! This is very useful.
sunilkumarc 12y ago
Is the FasteR IDE or any other equivalent command line utility available for Linux distributions ?
- fasteRstat 12y ago
  FasteR is available only for Windows. But for Linux you can use for example R Studio (mature tool compared to FasteR).
sunilkumarc 12y ago
Are there any ideas on making it opensource ?
- fasteRstat 12y ago
  Yes, in the case of fail as startup :)
smartera 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  A second typo: "This tools hepls"
bencollier49 12y ago
And yet they keep that butt-ugly logo. Is it an in-joke, or something?
- Blahah 12y 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 https://www.gnu.org/graphics/package-logos.html
  - ekianjo 12y 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.
  - bencollier49 12y ago
    And these aren't just developers. They're also *statisticians".
  - bencollier49 12y ago
    I really miss the old Python snake logo.
knowbody 12y ago
Are people still using windows?
- fsloth 12y ago
  http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0 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 12y ago
Interesting product. However, you should get a native English speaker to fix the grammar and spelling on your web site.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  At least they didn't spell it "FastR".
DonHopkins 12y ago
Beware the IDEs of March!
- mwexler 12y ago
  Oy. And yet, I couldn't stop myself from upvoting this comment. You made this day a touch better.
sean_the_geek 12y ago
Interesting indeed! especially the Excel part!
spaznode 12y ago
Being windows-only based, this sounds about as useful as an asshole on an elbow. .. I mean I only know one statistician using windows myself... not l33t dudes
amelius 12y 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 12y 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.)
  - baldfat 12y 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-beats-julia-anyone-else-wanna-challenge-r/ https://matloff.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/r-beats-python-r-be...
    - grayclhn 12y ago
      "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 12y ago
        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?
ekianjo 12y 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.
- vkr 12y 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 12y ago
    Website lists .net framework 4.5 as a requirement, so that seems unlikely.
    - ekianjo 12y ago
      I wonder why more people don't build tools with cross platform in mind in this time and age.
vkr 12y 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?
- fasteRstat 12y 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.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
bobcostas55 12y 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 12y ago
You really can't be bothered to at least `aspell` your website?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Mikeb85 12y 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 12y ago
Good ide
fasteRstat 12y 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.

122 points by fasteRstat 12y 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 http://fasterstat.com/Images/Desktop/12_R_gui.png which looks novel (can't currently watch the video unfortunately)

fasteRstat 12y ago
graphical user interface for selected packages/functions, support for multiple monitors,...
- jebus989 12y ago
  Both sound good, maybe you could highlight these on your landing page? The picker for RColorBrewer palettes looks particularly handy!
  - fasteRstat 12y ago
    Yes you're right. It's the plane.
    - melling 12y ago
      Typos on page: univerties FasteR - desctop application This tools hepls or as [an] application
      - jamessb 12y ago
        There are several other typos which, whilst trivial, are quite jarring: http://fasterstat.com/Product http://fasterstat.com/Product produsing -> producing poverfull -> powerful http://fasterstat.com/ http://fasterstat.com/ anoher -> another There is also inconsistent use of 'Addin' and 'Add-In'.
      - vkr 12y ago
        The video presents version 1.4.1 (last 10 seconds of the video), the website only lists version 0.4.1. I assume you changed the version number after finishing the video? It was hard/impossible for me to read the R code in the video while playing it at 1080p.
Blahah 12y 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.
- baldfat 12y 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
  - jackmaney 12y ago
    Agreed. 99% of the time, I only use Excel as a CSV viewer (and it's a rather clunky and error-prone CSV viewer at that).
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    > 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 12y ago
      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.

anacleto 12y ago

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

blawa 12y 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.
- anacleto 12y 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/excelreg.pdf 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.
baldfat 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
The latest RStudio preview release has Vim mode, if you're interested.
- thalesmello 12y ago
  The Vim mode in RStudio is rather disappointing. Doesn't even have support for macros.
  - jmcphers 12y ago
    It does now, in RStudio's public preview release: http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/02/23/rstudio-0-99-preview-vim-mode-improvements/ http://blog.rstudio.org/2015/02/23/rstudio-0-99-preview-vim-...

blawa 12y ago

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

sunilkumarc 12y ago

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

fasteRstat 12y ago
FasteR is available only for Windows. But for Linux you can use for example R Studio (mature tool compared to FasteR).

sunilkumarc 12y ago

Are there any ideas on making it opensource ?

fasteRstat 12y ago
Yes, in the case of fail as startup :)

smartera 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
A second typo: "This tools hepls"

bencollier49 12y ago

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

Blahah 12y 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 https://www.gnu.org/graphics/package-logos.html
- ekianjo 12y 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.
- bencollier49 12y ago
  And these aren't just developers. They're also *statisticians".
- bencollier49 12y ago
  I really miss the old Python snake logo.

knowbody 12y ago

Are people still using windows?

fsloth 12y ago
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0 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 12y ago

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

DonHopkins 12y ago
At least they didn't spell it "FastR".

DonHopkins 12y ago

Beware the IDEs of March!

mwexler 12y ago
Oy. And yet, I couldn't stop myself from upvoting this comment. You made this day a touch better.

sean_the_geek 12y ago

Interesting indeed! especially the Excel part!

spaznode 12y ago

Being windows-only based, this sounds about as useful as an asshole on an elbow. .. I mean I only know one statistician using windows myself... not l33t dudes

amelius 12y 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 12y 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.)
- baldfat 12y 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-beats-julia-anyone-else-wanna-challenge-r/ https://matloff.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/r-beats-python-r-be...
  - grayclhn 12y ago
    "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 12y ago
      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?

ekianjo 12y 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.

vkr 12y 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 12y ago
  Website lists .net framework 4.5 as a requirement, so that seems unlikely.
  - ekianjo 12y ago
    I wonder why more people don't build tools with cross platform in mind in this time and age.

vkr 12y 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?

fasteRstat 12y 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.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

bobcostas55 12y 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 12y ago

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

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Mikeb85 12y 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 12y ago

Good ide

fasteRstat 12y 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.