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Microsoft Announces R Tools For Visual Studio (technet.com)
theodp writes: A year after its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, Microsoft announced a slew of R-related product offerings, and noted that Revolution R Open is giving up her maiden name and will henceforth be known as Microsoft R Open. Tucked away in the announcement was the news that R is coming to Visual Studio. Microsoft has released a teaser video for R Tools for Visual Studio (RTVS) and is taking sign-ups for early access.
Damn, I am beginning to think that MS might actually be starting to take this whole free software thing seriously.
Many Visual Studio shops are also Microsoft only shops where open source is frowned upon and use of tools not included in the standard install is verboten. Microsoft is doing this to try and get tools into the hands of people who otherwise wouldn't be able to access them on closed corporate networks. However, even this isn't always effective since some managers are in the nasty habit of banning certain languages, features or other parts of an otherwise "standard" install that they don't like, probably because they're worried that some new hire will write some mission critical program in "R" and that when he's gone in a year or two they will have to pay consultants huge amounts of money to maintain or re-write the app in a language that's easier to hire for.
How long it will take for M$ to kill off the open source version of R
Can anyone comment on R vs. Python vs. something else for data science? I'm talking in terms of usefulness, maintainability, and finding enough candidates who know it (even hires straight from college)?
Hmm Matlab, ansoft, Pro-E, MMx Convolouter
sounds familiar?
Embrace, Extend Extinguish
'nuf said.
I read the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish article on Wikipedia looking for examples of this actually happening, and it had to go back 15 years to find an example. I think you need to find new things to complain about.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Check scipy.org and especially IPython ...
The R ecosystem seems to be the opposite of Microsoft's traditional ecosystems. About the only thing R library designers can agree upon is "dataframe is good." Packages that try to put a consistent front-end on other packages (i.e. caret) definitely helps. However, even something as simple as "does this algorithm want a factor or dummy variables?" may require examining the source code. Other more subtle things like "Does it was the data to be centered and scaled?" may slip by.
I hope Microsoft addresses this. As a researcher, a common task is to compare the performance of many algorithms against a new dataset or a new algorithm that you are developing, and it can be a pain to do in R. Weka is WAY more consistent in handling these sorts of things, but Weka only handles a subset of the tasks people do in R. Something as simple as style-guide docs would go a LONG way.
Microsoft actually has no other product like R, so I would imagine the real reason they bought R was so they could add an additional layer to their data analysis tools inside SQL server. It's actually a no-brainer. Do a SQL server query, store results in a data frame, run a clustering algorithm against the data to see purchasing habits.
To make "Embrace, Extend Extinguish" work as a strategy you need out outsize the people producing the alternatives or have means of pushing your version on the users that they do not, it is also useless is you already control the standard. With a Microsoft being a minority player in the web browser market it wont work for the web but since it has maintained it's office control it is useless in against office rivals, for now, add the general suspicion of Microsoft in many circles, there have been few opportunities to wield this strategy recently. R is however an ideal victim, it is large enough to be a threat, if people use R rather than Exell for big analysis then that hurts Microsoft's lock in and prestige among managers, but it is also small enough as a community that it can be pushed around. With Visual studio Microsoft has a vector to push it's subtly incompatible versions out and get people to use the "normal" features it adds, then it can stop adding and at the least hurt the reputation of the main version and frighten away new users with outdated or increasingly clunky "updated" code maybe even dent the current uptake a bit.
Billions of dollars, and they can't think-up a name that sounds a bit less stupid?
'S' (for "Statistics" - originally with single quotes, those are usually being dropped now) is a programming language created in 1975-1976 at Bell Labs (which had a tradition of single letter named programming languages, such as C) on General Electrics GCOS mainframes and since 1979 on UNIX.
R is an implementation of 'S' (with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme) since 1993.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
Not 'nuf. You missed a 'omma and an 'eriod.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They did not buy R though, it is an open source language that "Revolution Analytics" worked with, it would make more sense for them to try to tie this sort of function to exell, hence the suspicion
I remember back when Cobol was going out of style, and I was an early adopter of C++ (1987-ish). ADA was going to change the world, C++ was doomed to never go anywhere, and C was going to vanish. Yourdon wrote a book about the fall of the American programmer. I wept over my keyboard. I told everyone I was crying because my C++ compiler was so frigging slow. But I knew the world was going to change, that ADA was going to kill all the other languages, and I really loved working in C and C++. So I waited for the world to change. Prolog was a big deal about the same time, and I didn't want to miss out, so I jumped on it for functional. And the "wow" thing of the day was Expert Systems. They were going to change the world. So I wrote some interesting diggers with Prolog. And I waited for the world to change. In around 1992 I entered the CHICAGO beta with Microsoft in preparation for Windows NT (which was going to change the world). I even wrote a device driver for CHICAGO to operate a RHETOREX PCM telephony board, and a printer driver for an old ATARI thermal printer. Fun projects, actually. Didn't make a dime, though. OS/2 WARP came out around then. It was going to change the world. It was 1994 when I first saw Java. It was going to change the world. I looked at the language, and it didn't interest me: I had C++, and C++ was starting to grow. And I couldn't even imagine not having pointers, not being able to talk to the CPU or devices directly (sans imported libraries). 1995 came along, a friend handed me a stack of floppies (I think about 20), and installed SLACKWARE LINUX over my Windows partition. "This is going to change the world," he said. It was funny, but I really and for truly was convinced this time that the world would be changed, and I didn't wait. I jumped into Linux with everything I had, and I've been working in C and C++ in linux ever since. I'm not trying to be funny or anything. The truth of the matter is that I've listed only several languages here, but I've worked in at least two dozen others that probably most people have never heard of (e.g. SPL for MTM/32). I keep seeing language come and go, that are supposed to change the world. As a young engineer I'd jump on every new language that came out, but most of the time the language turned out to be raspy in some way, was good at exactly one thing, and pretty sucky at everything else. And here we are. 2015. I still work in C and C++ every day of the work week, but I don't see ADA anywhere, I haven't cranked a line of FORTRAN since 1993, I never had to write RPG for a living, I've avoided Cobol altogether, HASKELL never took off like it was supposed to (ditto EIFEL), MATLAB costs too much (even though it is a heck of a tool), I like Python and don't much care for Perl, and on and on and on. And I've debugged way more Java code than I ever wanted to, but I haven't written a single line of Java, yet. And here's what I wanted to get to... I opened up Slashdot today and found the OP's article, and watched the video. And you know what? THIS ISN"T ANYTHING NEW! Not the features, not the tools, not the results. It is yet another language, yet another IDE, and I'm seeing the same kind of features I was using back in the 90's. Funny thing... I use gcc/g++ for my compilers; I use VIM for my editor; and I do quite well. I hate IDE's with a passion; and any time I've been sentenced to use a product with "code completion" or "intellisense", I feel like I've joined some kind of Commune of the Damned. I've quit jobs to escape the transition so the baloney world of IDE productivity. Maybe that means I'm out of touch or old fashioned or "stuck in the 80's". But I've never wanted for a job. And the kids we interview today mostly know the current "hip" language(s) and/or IDE (Hey! lets write a web page, yah!), but if you ask them about superscalar architectures, or how to write a Fibonacci generator using C++ templates, or what a 3-way handshake is for, you get a deer-in-the-headlilghts stare.
Uber-Extinguish
R already embraced, extended and extinguished S.
There is nothing to be afraid of though, because R is already entrenched in serious use cases that are not otherwise reliant on MS. And MS doesn't have a monopoly anymore.
As an R user who uses emacs, I see this as a good thing. Demand for R will increase, and the problems it is good at solving are real PITAs using C or Java or Python or whatever.
A better comparison would be R vs Python (with Pandas) or metlab vs octave.
'S' (for "Statistics" - originally with single quotes, those are usually being dropped now) is a programming language created in 1975-1976 at Bell Labs (which had a tradition of single letter named programming languages, such as C) on General Electrics GCOS mainframes and since 1979 on UNIX.
I guess back then they didn't worry about the name being easy to google, unlike today's new languages with unique and descriptive names such as "go".
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The name 'R' was chosen partly as a play on the 'S' language that it emulates, and as a reference to the first letters of the first names of its first co-developers, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
For a time it was Embrace, Extend and Extinguish, but the last decade (maybe even longer) it was often Embrace, Extend, Abandon because of very low public appreciation.
Microsoft had to learn to live to play by the rules laid out by competitors. It seems that they finally start to realize that competitors are not always your enemies, and that you can work together with competitors in some ways, while competing in other ways. Using open source and even open sourcing your own work is an expression of this idea that you can try to work together with potential competitors who also become your customers to achieve their goals. Whenever a small competitor grows and has used your open source tools, they might even become evangelists of your own product.
For example .NET was a Java clone with all the capabilities to be cross platform, yet you could only write software for a select collection of MS OS. By open sourcing .NET it can be picked up by the community and extended to included non MS operating systems and even non Intel/AMD processors. All of the sudden a potential entrepreneur with a good idea doesn't have to fight with the limitation of Windows Home and VS Express, but he could use a full blown server OS like Linux/BSD or whatever and use all tools that are also available to the largest software houses while still basing their work on MS technology (for example MONO).
Everything that was new in the 21th century didn't use Microsoft as their OS of choice to start, grow and become a world leader. The companies who chose MS technology, well you never heard of them, probably going bankrupt from the sudden rise in license costs when their visitor count rose from 100 a day to 25 million a day (just imagine serving 100's of million of visitors on MS Servers... while you still haven't earned money).
The world is as you perceive it. The world can only change if your perception of the world changes. Even in a static world you could say "Now I'm going to that place and I'm going to do it this way, and never look back" and the world has changed.
Big companies tend to spend billions to try to change the world for as many as people as possible through marketing. That's how many big companies make money. And that's unfortunate, it takes away the democratic, free thinking of the individual.
When an individual is happy, he doesn't want to change the world, he wants to remain happy. Marketing (like all those world changing languages you learned to know by name first) tries to make people feel unhappy and offer the magic tool to make people happy again.
That's a lesson I had to learn. Don't try to wait for the world to change, it is you who has to change the world. You don't need to wait for when MS releases exiting tool X. You don't need to wait for when Apple releases iPhone Y. But when I look around I see too many people being unhappy because they don't have the latest or greatest. And this kind of company X announce product Y adds to bring a bit of unhappiness to some people (some call them sheeple).
I first started using R almost 3 years ago to learn how to do data science. At almost the same time I picked up ipython notebooks for doing reproducible research and data science in python. Because I'm much more familiar with the python programming language than R's statistical environment I ended up sticking with doing data science in python, but not before downloading and using Rstudio 2 years ago.
RStudio is an awesome gui frontend to R's command line interface that made working with R interactively much, much easier. It didn't hurt that RStudio was FOSS software that supported Linux, Windows, and Mac, I suppose you could even run it on BSD distros if you were patient enough to build it from scratch.
Having watched the video of Visual Studio's plugin for R I can't help but notice how closely the interface matches RStudio's in look and feel. For reference here are some screenshots of RStudio's gui: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/features/ compare it with the Visual Studio's interface in the video link in the article above and I think you'll see how much the Visual Studio interface imitates RStudio's gui.
I've been a linux user for 19+ years and it's been my experience that building FOSS software on Windows is a pain in the ass, because it's not a Unix OS, it doesn't really support POSIX compliance (it used to ~10-15 years ago to get government certification), it doesn't come with the Unix utilities, header files, libraries, etc. that FOSS software typically expects, and it doesn't come with a default OS compiler to compile code (you have to pay for Visual Studio for that), so typically FOSS software on Windows is distributed as binary packages instead of source tarballs.
What this means is that FOSS projects like R, with its 6000+ FOSS statistic packages has to compile binary packages of every last one of those packages in the appropriate dependency order on some dedicated Windows compile hosts for Windows users. In comparison, on any Unix like OS you typically just have to do a "install.packages('foobaz')" in an R session to download the source tarball for foobaz and that will pull down the appropriate dependencies if they're not already installed, compile them, and then install them.
As you can imagine, when comparing the 2 environments: Unix -- user just uses install.packages to install whatever they want vs. R personnel have to compile Windows binaries correctly, and then the user has to manually download the binaries it quickly becomes clear which environment is better to work with and which can require some tedious effort to get things installed and working.
It's no wonder then why Microsoft purchased the Revolution Analytics company, the company maintaining R and its repository of packages. If they didn't, use of R on Windows would have just withered away.
So now comes Microsoft developing a tool that's functionally identical to a FOSS gui that is platform neutral (RStudio), but Microsoft's version *only* works on Windows (Visual Studio). To me that seems to be a typical shitty thing to do that's perfectly consistent with Monopolist tactics.
If there was a problem with RStudio they could have worked with them to make the experience better for everyone, but instead Microsoft would rather shutdown RStudio. Maybe it's because Revolution Analytics didn't own RStudio and RStudio wouldn't sell their business to Microsoft?
So why has no one mentioned RStudio yet? We just seem to be talking R. This is pretty much a clone of RStudio so far, with *slightly* better code-completion. MS tools for open languages rarely give anything I can't get elsewhere, just the same stuff over their own tooling. I remember them pitching Python tools as if they invented the first IDE with code-completion for Python while I had been using tools with equivalent functionality for 10 years prior.
"I read the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish article on Wikipedia looking for examples of this actually happening, and it had to go back 15 years to find an example."
An example is an example. On the other hand, you can get the concept while not up to the letter. For a recent "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" strategy from Microsoft (only at a different level), look for what they tried to do to the Open Document format (and that's not 15 years ago).
Dumb. First, R is an open source language. Microsoft didn't buy R, they bought Revolution Analytics, a company that specializes in developing in R.
Second, R and Excel users would be two entirely different markets.
Here's a quote from Terry Myerson from Build 2015, talking about the Android bridge: "We will embrace these code bases and let you extend them and distribute them through the store. It’s the same approach we’ve had historically: do what it takes for customers to embrace Windows.”
It seems like the strategy hasn't changed.
Also, R is GPL.
Ramble, Rant, Run-on
That's not entirely the way I remember it. Microsoft didn't touch ODF, didn't extend or extinguish it. They tried to bypass the need for it.
There were calls for an open and standard format from many fronts and then ODF got a foothold. Microsoft then said but look we're open and standard and then quickly rushed OOXML through the standards committee, got rejected, made a minor amendment, and then rushed it through again and rigged the system to get it approved, all the while poorly supporting OOXML and barely supporting ODF at all.
That's not Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, that's just typical big player trying to stamp out small player through influence. It certainly wasn't like the complete and fully functional adoption of standards, extending them to become number one, and then retrospectively making them incompatible which is what the old process was like.
You're not obligated to show up anywhere. Just stay in bed as long as you like. Nobody has a gun to your head.
Of course they do.
You don't show up for work so you get fired. Then you can't pay the rent because you don't have a job so now you're homeless. You can't bear existing like that so you blow your brains out with the gun you bought with the last of your money.
So yeah, they do have a gun to your head.
They did not buy R though, it is an open source language that "Revolution Analytics" worked with, it would make more sense for them to try to tie this sort of function to exell, hence the suspicion
Microsoft bought the enhanced features surrounding R from Revolution Analytics, not the language itself.
I don't have any mod points, but this is the most insightful comment I've read on slashdot in a long, long time. Granted, it's probably Marketing 101 that every MBA knows though.
Well, there goes my "pirate R" joke.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No-one will use Excel instead of R for big data analysis. Excel maxes out at 1m rows and spreadsheets that size takes minutes to open while R takes seconds or less. All R users also use spreadsheets as a complementary tool and, in a commercial environment, that's always Excel.
Microsoft's vision for R appears to be completely different. They want to integrate R with their existing big data tools - Azure, SQL server, etc - to put their offering ahead of the likes of Amazon and Oracle.
"That's not entirely the way I remember it. Microsoft didn't touch ODF, didn't extend or extinguish it. They tried to bypass the need for it."
You don't think Microsoft people are stupid, nor their marketing guys haven't thought on what made Microsoft a successful company and what "embrace, extend, extinguish" really means and how it works, right?
Embrace: Oh! you people really want "open standards"? Like ODF? I'll give you one.
Extend: Here you have an open standard just like you want them: docx. And I'll make sure I get docx to be approved and to be in a position of being chosen by EU governments and whoever says that needs and open standard. Certainly I'll add little things to these kind of standards, like binary blobs or "this is to be implemented just like in Word 6" paragraphs, so it becomes impossible to re-implement.
Extinguish: Oh, by the way, in the process of making docx an open standard, I'll corrupt the standard-approval process so much that no one ever will ask for anything-open again.
Oh god please let these young whippersnapper statisticians who's research is so important the company even the the whole IT department doesn't know who they are so all the do is go to the UNIX guys go bother the Windows guys.
In addition, they 'embraced' ODF itself by providing an ODF format option in MSOffice that didn't work with any other ODF implementation - by intentionally 'interpreting' vague aspects of the spec as 'anything but what's already been implenented in OpenOffice'. At the same time, releasing an MSOffice implementation of OOXML that differs from the published standard.
Not exactly playing nice. More like polluting an existing standard while waiting for their monopoly magic to entrench their new pseudo-standard. Kind of like Java vs C#. And for the C# fans out there, it's not necessarily that their stuff isn't ever any good (though if excess complexity is a negative, OOXML's gotta be one of the worst standards ever). The point is that Microsoft could well embrace true open standards - even while keeping its implementations closed source, and even possibly coming out on top with the best implementation. But time and again, they try to subvert open standards. The simple fact that they're losing some of their ability to do it these days doesn't change a thing IMHO.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
There is a list of examples right in the article.
Historically embrace has been about specific compatibility with the product or protocol, not some standard business activity of creating a competitor to something that exists.
You're not remotely describing embrace extend extinguish as it has been applied to the Microsoft model, but you're describing standard business practices, which given when Microsoft came up with the strategy was very different.
But while we're debunking, giving people exactly what they want which a competitor has already got or is in the process of is not extending.
Doing something feely about a process without actually doing anything to destroy or make the competitor's system incompatible is not extinguishing.
Yes this was more like it. Except they only embraced and attempted to extinguish. They missed the extend step which is critical as you need a critical mass and a critical number of users tied in to your system before you attempt the final step.
R-Tools Technology Inc. is a data recovery company. R-Studio helped me successfully recover otherwise lost data in the past on 2 occasions.
-Eric
It is yet another language, yet another IDE
I don't think you can call Visual Studio, yet another IDE.