Roughly a year ago, I made some noises on this blog about wanting to learn R. Not sur­pris­ingly, I didn’t do it.

A year later I’m a gov­ern­ment sci­en­tist with some sta­tis­tics to do, and I’m once again thinking of learning me some R. In the interim, I’ve received an email assuring me “you could get up and run­ning with it within a day, I think. Master it in a week or two”. So I down­load the package — it’s free! — install it, and boot it up. I’m looking at a com­mand line con­sole labelled the “GUI” (ha ha), with the fol­lowing help text:

“Type ‘demo()’ for some demos”

Demos! Perfect! Let’s see some con­crete exam­ples of how to do sta­tis­tics in R-​​land! So I type demo() into the “GUI” prompt, and receive the fol­lowing output:

Demos in package ‘base’:

is.things: Explore some prop­er­ties of R objects and is.FOO() func­tions. Not for new­bies!
recur­sion: Using recur­sion for adap­tive inte­gra­tion
scoping: An illus­tra­tion of lex­ical scoping.

Demos in package ‘graphics’:

Hershey: Tables of the char­ac­ters in the Hershey vector fonts
Japanese: Tables of the Japanese char­ac­ters in the Hershey vector fonts
graphics: A show of some of R’s graphics capa­bil­i­ties
image: The image-​​like graphics builtins of R
persp: Extended persp() exam­ples
plot­math: Examples of the use of math­e­matics annotation

Demos in package ‘stats’:

glm.vr: Some glm() exam­ples from V&R with sev­eral pre­dic­tors
lm.glm: Some linear and gen­er­al­ized linear mod­el­ling exam­ples from ‘An Introduction to Statistical Modelling’ by Annette Dobson
nlm: Nonlinear least-​​squares using nlm()
smooth: ‘Visualize’ steps in Tukey’s smoothers

Use ‘demo(package = .packages(all.available = TRUE))’ to list the demos in all *avail­able* packages.

Tables of the char­ac­ters in the Hershey vector fonts? demo(package = .packages(all.available = TRUE))? Some of the ‘stats’ pack­ages sounded like they might make sense, so I tried to run them, but I couldn’t figure out how. I love the idea of open source bare-​​knuckle com­puting. I wish I loved it in practice.