R is ready for big data Take the open road to statistical
analysis Statistical analysis has been around since mainframes
were introduced to academia and corporations back in the 1960s.
But the great diversity of telemetry collected by systems today,
the need to sift through it for insight and the growing
popularity of open-source alternatives is transforming the R
programming language for statistical analysis and visualisation.
Its new nickname is Red Hat for stats. Everybody loves R,
particularly those selling big-data products such as data
warehouses and Hadoop data munchers. Part of the reason is that
R is an open source package that solicits input from a large and
clever community of statisticians and quantitative analysts who
are able to steer its development. This was not the case for
proprietary tools created by SAS Institute and SPSS at the dawn
of the mainframe era, and their follow-ons in the distributed
computing era. Just as Linux can be thought of as an open-source
analog to Unix, the R programmi