Microsoft buying Revolution Analytics is another piece of evidence shoes Microsoft has its A-game back. R is massively popular in the statistical community, it is basically the PHP of analytics (huge standard library with no namespaces but very easy to get started with and powerful for advanced users).<p>Additionally R is one of the few languages where you can be productive in a non-unix environment. At my old Windows workplace, R was the only open source language with working network NTLM authentication out of the box. Everything can be self-contained in RStudio, an interpreter and gui package manager to stop you jumping to the command line, and a help system to stop you using man.<p>By buying becomming closely associated with R, Microsoft is more likely to be a component in large analytics investments i.e. "let's get Microsoft's R distro, oh and why not their big data plaform too?", and ensures its services and databases are well integrated in this upcoming language.
The write once run anywhere concept is intriguing. R has major scaling issues and a lot of the algorithms and packages in the CRAN just don't scale to any reasonable amounts of data. It really was designed in an era of controlled experiments with minimal data.
Does someone know how does this work with regards to the GPL? I have heard that they have a complete reimplementation of R. Really? What about all of the GPL'ed packages at CRAN, do they just not ship those?<p>I also know that the R developers don't really enforce the GPL. Is that what's going on here?
I don't know a lot about R, but apart from the fact that it's made for stats, isn't it a great language because it's also aimed to handle embarrassingly parallel programs, and no other other language do it as well as R ?<p>I guess R is used in machine learning fields.<p>Is R opencl enabled, or is it planned to be ?
I have to say I am very disappointed in the information, after the title got me so excited.<p>No announcements about Excel? I really hope R lands in Excel, it will open big opportunities for developers and businesses.<p>Also there was a guy from MS, who created python tools for VS and asked if anyone would want R tools for VS. After receiving a very warm response, never heard from him again. What's up with that? Parallel to that RA has an IDE, which uses the VS shell. Will we have more streamlined R workflow in VS? This is important for a lot of people...<p>What about R.NET?