R at Microsoft
blog.revolutionanalytics.com
blog.revolutionanalytics.com
Additionally R is one of the few languages where you can be productive in a non-unix environment. At my old Windows workplace, R was the only open source language with working network NTLM authentication out of the box. Everything can be self-contained in RStudio, an interpreter and gui package manager to stop you jumping to the command line, and a help system to stop you using man.
By buying becomming closely associated with R, Microsoft is more likely to be a component in large analytics investments i.e. "let's get Microsoft's R distro, oh and why not their big data plaform too?", and ensures its services and databases are well integrated in this upcoming language.
I started laughing, then I realized you meant that as a compliment.
R has a great community and a ton of unique packages, though many of those great packages are thin wrappers over Fortran/C libraries and are available in a host of other languages (Python, Julia) that, in my opinion, have better features when it comes to testing and group-based development.
In my experience, R degenerates into a rat's nest more easily than the other candidates. I've been hired twice for this explicit reason.
BTW, I think your comparison with PHP is apt. R has many of the same strengths and flaws.
This world hasn't disappeared, y'know. Many of the specialized packages on CRAN deal with things like missing data, removing selection bias from longitudinal studies and distinguishing mediated from direct effects. These concerns are by and large not even applicable to the data the average data scientist deals with, so why even bother making them scalable?
On the ML front, on the other hand, R has never really been a forerunner.
> "The vast majority of businesses will never deal with machine learning."
However, is myopic. It plausibly will not hold for much longer in most areas, and is already not true for a significant number of industries.
3D printing has had limited impact for prototyping in the many decades it has been around, and in the expected quarters. That's pretty much what every analysis I've seen except a very few boosters have predicted, for what it's worth.
On the other hand ML has fundamentally changed: document processing, search engines, remote sensing, retail sales, e-commerce, etc. ; It has also strongly impacted areas of logistics and shipping, manufacturing, (e.g. computer vision & robotics), medicine, law enforcement, finance, defense, also etc.
It's also poised to find market advantages in many non-obvious industries as larger scale data becomes available... unclear how far that will extend.
Where's the parallel you see?
I hope you do not confuse machine learning with statistics and data mining. They are very different.
At any rate, your experience in industry seems to be quite different than mine.
Using R functions via closures against Spark RDDs in a cluster has the potential to deliver pretty good performance against large scale data.
I also know that the R developers don't really enforce the GPL. Is that what's going on here?
As far as CRAN goes, the licenses of the packages there have nothing to do with the license of the R implementations they run on. Even if MS has their own implementation of R, it should be able to download and run packages from CRAN without MS having to worry about it.
[1] http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/05/r-in-sql-server....
The FSF would beg to differ the last time i looked, depending on the situation: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLPluginsInNF
is the closest to their position on this.
Basically, if you can function call into R from SQL/etc, and it's just not just a subprocess completely independent, their view is that you'd have to GPL the main process.
The FSF also does not think that whether the GPL'ed program is a separate process or not determines whether the bundle as a whole is GPL'ed or not. In their opinion, if you bundle the whole thing and it acts as a whole, and the communication between the GPL'ed components and the non-free parts are "intimate enough"[1], then the whole bundle is copylefted. It seems to me that bundling R with SQL server and tightly coupling the two, even across different processes, could well qualify.
Of course, if the R developers do not want to enforce their copyleft, none of this matters.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
GPL like any other software licenses defines the terms when authorization is granted, and instead of asking money it only request that you share and share alike the source code. Some people find that to be a fair concept, while others prefer to spend money and time to create their own implementation. Depending on the level of market competition, business models, and revenue streams reimplementing existing software can be valid but in most times its not.
Yes, that's always been the whole point of the GPL. (The LGPL exists if you want to release your library without that requirement)
If they are shipping a GPL version of R, then this is a legal grey area, with different opinions from differing lawyers, mostly on whether it's a derivative work covered by the GPL or not.
It's honestly, not worth getting into the whole discussion, because there are no lights at the end of the tunnel, only opinions on all sides that are usually supported by reasonable arguments.
Is it a clean-room reimplementation of R? (like the relationship between .NET and Mono) Or is it a "distribution" of R? (like the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu?)
Whether the R implementation here is non-GPL, or whether it actually is running in a "fork-and-exec" separate process, I'm sure that Microsoft has their bases covered. They know more than a thing or two about software licensing, and certainly wouldn't take any risks of subjecting their flagship enterprise database to the GPL.
However, I'm completely uncertain as to what the legal status of Microsoft's R implementation means in terms of libraries that one can use from CRAN (aren't many of those GPL'ed as well?).
For me, I work in the real world, where you're not allowed to touch the GPL with a 10-foot pole, so this is of idle curiosity only. I'm not sure if Microsoft is trying to appeal to academia here, or if it's just a P.R. move in general... but if they expect to sell this to business users, then they're going to have to put a LOT more effort into clarifying its legal status.
I must work in the imaginary world, since we are allowed to use GPL'ed stuff at work. In fact, I got hired at my current job to improve GPL'ed stuff. And I don't work in academia.
Whenever I hear stories about how big companies can't touch the GPL, I always call "bullshit". Of course they can; and in fact many large companies do. Some, sadly, are just full of inefficient bureaucracy that feeds their employees big fat lies about how the GPL will destroy us all.
I guess R is used in machine learning fields.
Is R opencl enabled, or is it planned to be ?
Btw. almost down-vote for "embarrassingly"
You mean I misspelled ?
That's basically all you need on a day-to-day basis.
http://www.slideshare.net/RevolutionAnalytics/r-at-microsoft...
No announcements about Excel? I really hope R lands in Excel, it will open big opportunities for developers and businesses.
Also there was a guy from MS, who created python tools for VS and asked if anyone would want R tools for VS. After receiving a very warm response, never heard from him again. What's up with that? Parallel to that RA has an IDE, which uses the VS shell. Will we have more streamlined R workflow in VS? This is important for a lot of people...
What about R.NET?
Unless microsoft address some of the core issues with using excel as a "tools" platform - I'd prefer they didn't encourage it any more than they already do.
Since excel 2013 came out several spreadsheets which used to function in 2010 no longer do, and anything over ~50mb has become significantly less stable.
I've spent literally days debugging excel tools with VBA split all around between sheets, modules, classes etc with no documentation. Not to mention that additional logic lives in the various formulae inside worksheets (which may or may not be dynamically updated multiple times during code execution and then trigger a worksheet_changed macro).
The value of source control is pretty limited for an excel sheet, and I've been in a situation whereby a source controlled sheet could no longer be saved without excel crashing. The end solution was to copy all of the modules/sheets/extraneous code into a new workbook. A highly manual process. It appeared to work - but good luck proving I didn't screw it up.
Links to other workbooks are significantly more unstable in 2013 (they're probably a terrible idea anyway, but the company considers it the best way to affirm the data being used for calculations is right).
Excel 2013 launches differently to 2010 breaking every excel tool which relied on launch args.
I can probably find a bunch of other reasons that excel is something that literally gives me nightmares. I'm not exaggerating, and based on a few conversations with people in various finance companies this is far from isolated to myself and my company.
Exactly my point. You just like to pride yourself in how much you know and the 'proper way to do things'. If you dig deep enough to the core of the Earth, you will find a win98 machine, running Excel. How bad can it be, if the Earth runs on it?
i'm also hiring for the project, so if you're into dev tools (editors, debuggers, profilers, languages, ...) and looking, pls drop me a line. looking for devs and a technical PM.
re R.Net - no effort that i know of.
Can't help you with development. but I will be more than happy to beta test. I make analytics applications, encapsulated in asp.net and additionally use R for market research.