[6275] in s-news-athena
Re: table and S-Plus documentation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anthony Rossini)
Fri Jan 27 09:11:11 1995
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 08:32:51 -0500 (EST)
From: Anthony Rossini <arossini@biostats.hmc.psu.edu>
To: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
In-Reply-To: <199501262008.PAA20392@biostat2.mc.duke.edu>
On Thu, 26 Jan 1995, Frank Harrell wrote:
> I could not disagree more with Lyle Lofgren's comments about the
> documentation
> of the table() function. That documentation makes it abundantly clear
> what the function does.
> One other note: do help.start() and look up functions under the key words
> "Categorical Data". This points to table().
I feel that I need to reply to this and countless other similar remarks.
With all due respect to Prof. Harrell, S-Plus is now being marketed as an
easy-to-use package, and quite a number of people without much formal
**general** statistical training (as opposed to knowing a good bit about
common methods for a specific applicable subject) are using the package.
While I personally find the manuals easy to read and S-Plus simple to
program in and obtain results (I also like and prefer C, Lisp, TeX,
emacs, and UNIX hacking, but that's just a matter of taste) , we need to
consider that there are more and more people that see the pretty
pictures in the adverts and pick up the package, to whom "table" and
"Categorical Data" are not exactly meaningful (i.e. might've had a basic
stat course, but primarily work with linear models and time series, etc,
though this isn't a great example).
S-Plus -- it's not just for "professionals" anymore... And we should
think about that before pointing out that it is obvious.
This also has to do with comfort levels -- Prof Venables mentioned the
reluctance of students to use online help; this is probably more because
it is a "new" behaviour which must be learned, at least that was my
experience -- some people need to be "hand-held" more than others, and I
would hazard the guess that many people on this list need less
"hand-holding" than most, but I suspect that will be changing soon
enough with the popularization of the 'net...
Sorry for the wasted bandwidth :-).
-tony
----
Anthony Rossini Assistant Professor and General Nuisance
Center for Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Penn State College of Medicine
P.O. Box 850, Hershey, PA 17033-0850 717-531-7178 (w) 717-531-5779 (fax)
arossini@biostats.hmc.psu.edu http://biosun1.harvard.edu/~rossini/
http://wishart.biostats.hmc.psu.edu:2000/~arossini/ (slow connection)
