Editorial

The ‘Editorial’ article from the 2009-1 issue.

Early in the morning of January 7, 2009 — very early, from the perspective of readers in Europe and the Americas, as I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan — I noticed a somewhat surprising title on the front web page of the New York Times: “Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power”. My prior probability that a favorite programming language would find its way to the Times front page was rather low, so I navigated to the article to check. There it was: an early version, minus the photographs. Later a few nice pictures were added, and a Bits Blog http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/r-you-ready-for-r/ created. As of early May, the blog includes 43 entries received from January 8 to March 12 and includes comment from Trevor Hastie clarifying historical roots of R in S, from Alan Zaslavsky reminding readers of John Chambers’s ACM award and its role in funding an American Statistical Association prize for students’ software development, and from numerous others on aspects of various proprietary and non-proprietary solutions to data analytic computing problems. Somewhat more recently, the Times blog was back in the fold, describing a SAS-to-R interface (February 16). As a native New Yorker, it is natural for me to be aware, and glad, of the Times’ coverage of R; consumers of other mainstream media products are invited to notify me of comparable coverage events elsewhere.

As R’s impact continues to expand, R News has transitioned to The R Journal. You are now reading the first issue of this new periodical, which continues the tradition of the newsletter in various respects: articles are peer-reviewed, copyright of articles is retained by authors, and the journal is published electronically through an archive of freely downloadable PDF issues, easily found on the R project homepage and on CRAN. My role as Editor-In-Chief of this first issue of the new Journal is purely accidental – the transition has been in development for several years now, with critical guidance and support from the R Foundation, from a number of R Core members, and from previous editors. I am particularly thankful for John Fox’s assistance with this transition, and we are all indebted to co-editors Peter Dalgaard and Heather Turner for technical work on the new Journal’s computational infrastructure, undertaken on top of already substantial commitments of editorial effort.

While contemplating the impending step into a new publishing vehicle, John Fox conceived a series of special invited articles addressing views of “The Future of R”. This issue includes two articles in this projected series. In the first, John Chambers analyzes R into facets that help us to understand the ‘richness’ and ‘messiness’ of R’s programming model. In the second, Stefan Theußl and Achim Zeileis describe R-Forge, a new infrastructure for contributing and managing source code of packages destined for CRAN. A number of other future-oriented articles have been promised for this series; we expect to issue a special edition of the Journal collecting these when all have arrived.

The peer-reviewed contributions section includes material on programming for diagram construction, HTML generation, probability model elicitation, integration of the multivariate normal density, Hilbert spectrum analysis, microarray study design, parallel computing support, and the predictive modeling markup language. Production of this issue involved voluntary efforts of 22 referees on three continents, who will be acknowledged in the year-end issue.

Note

This article is converted from a Legacy LaTeX article using the texor package. The pdf version is the official version. To report a problem with the html, refer to CONTRIBUTE on the R Journal homepage.