I think of myself as a burgeoning statistician first and a programmer a distance second. That might just be due to my first interests, and obviously data mining, data analysis and machine learning are truly both rather than one or the other.<p>In the stats community, R is widely used and I wanted to know if there were any R users on HN? If so, what exciting things are you doing or have you seen with the language?
GGplot2, by H Wickham<p><a href="http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/" rel="nofollow">http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/</a><p>and the bay Area user's group<p><a href="http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/10446894/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/10446894/</a>
I've been using R for 4 years to analyse microarrays and to do nonlinear time series analysis on signals.<p>I'm using nonstandard methods based on my own code, third party command line programs and extensions I wrote in 'C'. I chose R over Matlab or Octave because it has a more powerful programming language and a nice time series datastructure.<p>Despite doing very little statistics for the last 2 years I'm still very happy with R. People I know who use Matlab tell me they only do it for the available libraries.
R is a great language. I have been using R for a while. However, I wonder if someone could make a free,nice,simple yet powerful user interface for R. For my fellow biologists who wants to do some data analysis,the learning curve of R is just too steep.