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back to article R you ready? Open source stats come to Visual Studio

There's no longer any particular surprise to hear the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence: in the latest addition to its stable, Redmond is wrapping the venerable statistical package R in its warm embrace. The company has offered a first look at R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) here. While commercial …

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  1. Joe Werner Silver badge
    Pint

    Interesting!

    I am using R (under Linux), but this looks extremely interesting. It hopefully will replace the ugly and stupid RStudio for Windows user... Plus the hopefully easier use of multithreaded and parallel libraries in projects sounds interesting even for me.

    OTOH I also had good experience with R in eclipse.

    3 0 Reply
  2. Gordon 10

    so basically

    MS have added R syntax highlighting in VS and are hosting a CRAN repo.

    /Slowhandclap MS

    2 13 Reply
  3. Fraggle850

    WTF is going on with Microsoft?

    R in VS? I'm loving that idea, as both a VS user and someone who dabbles in R Studio on Windows the thought of being able to build R directly in VS is rather exciting!

    Microsoft seem to be doing some good things for devs lately, especially independent ones like me. One current project caused me to review a number of cloud platforms to determine which was best suited to my purposes and to my surprise I came to the conclusion that Azure was the best fit. This in spite of the fact that I'm not actually developing specifically for Windows in this case.

    Thank *deity* they dropped monkey-boy Ballmer for Satya Nadella - go SatNad!

    4 1 Reply
    1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
      Reply Icon

      Re: WTF is going on with Microsoft?

      Time to get the "The End Is Nigh!" sign from the attic (again)?

      2 0 Reply
  4. CAPS LOCK

    Embracing and extending R?

    This can only end well...

    0 5 Reply
    1. Fraggle850
      Reply Icon

      Re: Embracing and extending R?

      That depends on how they plan to 'extend' it. If they are extending it so that it can compile into vs apps then that is good. If they plan to extend it by sticking in proprietary shite that's incompatible with standalone R then that's bad.

      AFAIK R only works as a runtime interpreted script at present, being able to compile it would be a welcome bonus.

      0 1 Reply
  5. ratfox

    Good move

    This is one of the case where the open source version is on par with, and possibly superior to commercial products.

    ... Moderated comments? This seems like a benign and uncontroversial subject, though.

    0 0 Reply
    1. arctic_haze
      Reply Icon

      Re: Good move

      I believe moderation jumps in if there is anything Microsoft related in the article.

      0 0 Reply
  6. arctic_haze

    R is useful

    Generally R is a beautiful language to work on data.

    To make even the accountants interested, I share a one line script to hide all the quarters when the company was in the red:

    Quarterly.results <- Quarterly.results[Quarterly.results>0]

    2 0 Reply
    1. Fraggle850
      Reply Icon

      Re: R is useful

      > Generally R is a beautiful language to work on data.

      Indeed, but syntactically a little odd if you are coming from C-based languages

      > To make even the accountants interested,

      Surely you just needed to tell them that it is free? Beancounters will be beancounters...

      2 0 Reply
      1. arctic_haze
        Reply Icon

        Re: R is useful

        >>syntactically a little odd if you are coming from C-based languages<<

        It's true. And I am.

        But that's the fun. I like the way R treats vectors the way C treats integers and I always try to write in R without using loops. I succeed 90% of the time.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: R is useful

          It cannot be worse than q , obviously. Let me check with quants if we are also using R ...

          0 0 Reply
  7. Bsquared

    New users to gibbering wrecks? Oh yes....

    Got to grips with R a couple of years ago in a course taught by a statistician. We started off 30+ strong as a room full of keen postgrad and postdoctoral biologists and epidemiologists. By the end, we were down to 5, all with prior coding experience. R takes no prisoners amongst the ignorant, and you need considerable statistical as well as coding knowledge to use it.

    But hey - free - as in beer! And you can do more with it than with SPSS, in certain areas.

    0 0 Reply
  8. Bronek Kozicki

    I did not know about Microsoft R Open

    ... so this moved my jaw towards the floor, rather quickly:

    What is the license for Microsoft R Open?

    This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, either Version 2, June 1991 or Version 3, June 2007

    1 0 Reply

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