Re: guppi/goose and R

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On 30 Aug 1998, Herve Dreau wrote:
> Hello,
> I was glad when i saw a statistical/graphical programm for gnome, but
> do you known R ?

Hi,

Let me add just a little to what Jon said.

I downloaded R and the demos are pretty darn cool - it pretty much does 
all the plot types we want Guppi to do, very nicely and with Postscript 
output too. I'm definitely going to have a look at the source and look for
useful stuff.

Conceivably we could use R as a kind of backend for Guppi. The one major
barrier to this is that Guppi has interactive plots, while R has a
batch-mode setup. That is, for R you enter all the information and then
hit "output" and it goes to screen or printer. Guppi will have/has
interactive plots; you can modify them on-the-fly, click on a region to
zoom in on, select a data point to view info on, etc. 

However there are still possibilities. For example, R could treat Guppi as
another output device, dumping a data structure Guppi could load. Or Guppi
could have an "R" subsystem, where data could be fed to R or Guppi asks R
to do some plots. I think we will have plugins for both statistical
operations and plot types, so R could be used in either kind of plugin. It
also looks like R has some neat docs (I plan to use them as a convenient
list of parameters each plot type should definitely support). 

Anyway basic point is I don't think R will be able to handle the core
functionality of Guppi, but the Guppi framework could easily handle an R
plugin with the functionality you're describing. Once our plugin
architecture is working of course. :-) You could think of Guppi as a kind
of "statistical desktop," allowing you to stuff the same data set into an
R plugin, the native Guppi plugins, Gnumeric, or whatever you like.
Guppi's main executable could be a central GUI for managing the data sets,
and a protocol for shipping data sets around.

I think we'd really like to have some kind of extension language
functionality in Guppi, anyway. I hope someone will work with us to do
that while retaining the "interactive GUI" aspect.

Havoc