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Comment by colins_pride | Hacker News Reader

Web data mining is so due for a renaissance. At big companies, purge rules eliminate old data to save on storage costs. At startups the focus is always on getting a product out, adding features & getting users. When guys start figuring out how to tease real value out of the data, this is going to snowball. And R is the right platform for figuring it out.

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How so? Can you elaborate?

Sure; I'm assuming you're asking about my assertion that "R is the right platform ... " I've used S-PLUS fairly extensively, and I think there's a lot in common between R and S-PLUS. But R doesn't have the licensing constraints, which makes all of the difference in the world. To me, R represents a good high-level prototyping language with a very extensive native statistical library.

I would also add that I'm much more attached to the idea that web data mining is the future, than I am attached to the idea that R is the best platform. We'll see what happens!

  I think there's a lot in common between R and S-PLUS.

Indeed. R is sometimes called "GNU S".

That would probably be easier to search for...

R is essentially an open source S-Plus implementation. S-Plus licensing can be an issue, particularly when you are running on a cluster. I worked at a place that used S-Plus and they had a to limit the number of S-Plus slots to run jobs against because of licensing.

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