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Brought To You By the Letter R: Microsoft Acquiring Revolution Analytics
theodp writes Maybe Bill Gates' Summer Reading this year will include The Art of R Programming. Pushing further into Big Data, Microsoft on Friday announced it's buying Revolution Analytics, the top commercial provider of software and services for the open-source R programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. "By leveraging Revolution Analytics technology and services," blogged Microsoft's Joseph Sirosh, "we will empower enterprises, R developers and data scientists to more easily and cost effectively build applications and analytics solutions at scale." Revolution Analytics' David Smith added, "Now, Microsoft might seem like a strange bedfellow for an open-source company [RedHat:Linux as Revolution Analytics:R], but the company continues to make great strides in the open-source arena recently." Now that it has Microsoft's blessing, is it finally time for AP Statistics to switch its computational vehicle to R?
Microsoft acquired a company that provides commercial services for R. It does not own the R project. The R Project is a GNU project and there's no way in hell that the FSF would have sold R to Microsoft.
Considering that this company neither owns the R language or holds any copyright over it it seems highly unlikely.
Microsoft acquired a company who develops a forked version of R. R itself is a GNU project and is not owned or controlled by either Microsoft or the company they bought. You're hyperventilating over nothing.
I think that's being too harsh. As the paper described in its conclusions of the 3 groups who make use of R, the largest and primary group is the users, people who don't do programming in R, but rather make use of it for generating and displaying statistics in an interactive environment. R is a much better language to work I think if one has to access to RStudio, the gui frontend to R.
Is R a good general purpose programming language in the sense of other programming languages such as C/C++, python, perl, shell scripting, etc.? No, I think it's clear it's not a good general purpose language, but for what it focuses on, namely make it easy to do statistical computations it's hard to beat the language.
For statistical analysis the only competitor I see for it is a mixture of ipython notebook + python statistical modules such as pandas, numpy, scipy, pymc, sklearn,statsmodel, pystan, etc.