Emacs (and a bit of JMP 9.0)
I recently had a comment on Emacs being a pretty good text editor. I’ve been using it on and off for about three months (sorry I haven’t posted any reviewed…my daughter hit the terrible two’s at three and she’s been a handful!).
Emacs is a very good text editor but the learning curve is incredibly steep!!!!!! I had to have a colleague who used it extensively in grad school install his install on my laptop, and teach me a few execution commands. Overall, it may be great for hard core R programmers (of which I consider myself one) who want to let everyone else know that they’re hard core programmers, but I’d rather spend my time learning/developing new R procedures than learning another language that will allow me to execute R commands. The plain ol’ text editor in R works just fine for me.
BUT, with that being said, I’m a beta tester for JMP 9.0 (of which I’ll write a post about in the near future) and beginning with JMP 9.0 they will be fully integrated with R.
NOTE: Those who aren’t familiar with JMP, visit they’re web-site and check out some of their software videos. My guess is that you’ll be impressed.
JMP’s aready-in-place and very good text editor for JMP scripts (of which I am a HUGE fan) allows you to execute R commands right from JMP. So chances are that I’ll switch over to JMP as my all-one-stop programming place. PLUS, you can now write extremely elegant front end GUIs to R directly from JMP (and make them menu options in JMP).
JMP is relatively inexepensive by software standards, and very popular in applied statistics circles, so this new integration and ability to build classy looking GUIs has the potential to make R even bigger in certain industries…but more on this in a later post.
