R is Rising from inauspicous beginnings

I've long been a big fan and a frequent user of "R," the free and bleeding-edge statistical software and programming language.

In the past when I mentioned R people hadn't a clue what I was talking about. That has been changing at a steady but seemingly exponential rate.

So the New York Times recently had two pieces about R, here and here. And there is discussion among practicing data geeks about the future of R (bright?) and the future of SAS (not so bright?). See Andrew Gelman's excellent blog where he weighs in here, here, and here.

For the record, I use SAS too.

You can learn about and download R here.

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