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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.
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.
Not that seriously though. Like most large companies they're more than willing to open source their software when it doesn't cost them anything or there's no practical benefit to keeping the source closed, but Microsoft isn't going to open source their OS or other products that make them the bulk of their money. This is true of others like Apple or Google that contribute to various open source projects or have open sourced some of their code, but the software that's responsible for most of their income is still locked down tightly.
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
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
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.
I've got no problem with that. These companies are in business to make money. They aren't charities, and I wouldn't expect them to give away the software that provides most of their income. If they did, they'd go out of business.
But consider what you said. Just because it costs them nothing to open source something, and there's no benefit to keeping it closed, that still isn't a reason to open source it. They could just as easily keep it closed anyway. And in the old Microsoft, which saw open source as evil and did everything they could to discredit it, that's exactly what they would have done. Their new attitude seems to be, "If it doesn't hurt us to open source something, then sure, let's go ahead and do it." That's a big change.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Well, it's because they have a new boss on top. The first boss said sharing was bad and you're an evil person if you did (Bill's famous letter to hobbyists in the 70s). The second one basically kept "Microsoft is dominant and we will rule" while the current one is more humble and akin to "OK, we have PCs, but PCs are not the be-all-end-all computing device anymore, and while we make a lot of money here, it's a mature product and it won't last". It's why they're putting Office everywhere - even on non-Windows things - you can have it on your smartphone, your tablet, etc. And while it's not necessarily great for producing content, if you need to update a slide on the way to the customer, well, that's a sale of Office365 subscriptions, because they can do it in under a minute, rather than try to dig out their laptop, start it up, etc.
If anything, the new Microsoft realizes its no longer the central part of everyone's lives - you don't need a PC for everyone in the household (and likewise a Windows and Office license) - a lot, if not most, are perfectly happy to just use a smartphone and tablet, and maybe from time to time, use the shared PC.
So it's busy finding new ways to be a part, to make itself relevant again. Not a bad thing, really - if you were wedded to a Microsoft solution, it just means Microsoft is now offering more ways to stay Microsoft only. If you're not, well, maybe it will attract you into the fold.