Hello EpiData Friends,
Im just writing a few lines to you at the end of my working day to share some toughts that I have recently.
In the last four years I invested a lot of effort and time tring to learn R due to my PhD object. Right now I feel confrtable with R, but in the biginning I felt like banging my head in many places to make stuff work. For the same reason I signed some R mail lists around to trade some doubts and solutions.
About three weeks ago, a EpiInfo developer posted a message in epidemiologic issues for R users and it seems that he wanted to go for a EPiInfo - R interface. I was curious and found out that the latest version of EpiInfo available at CDC is 2 years old. My guess is that it is too old for a software. Clearly it was not a oficial CDC contact.
Wondering why and how this could be done I realize that most likely R cand do every analysis EpiInfo can and much more. The disadvantageous are: R is is not friedly for the uninitiated, and has no default and complete GUI, although there are several GUIs available.
A EPI extesion could be developed in R, while there is already four of them, that I know of. But there some sntroger point to consider in developing stuff in R:
(1) opensource software is growing (2) R is opensource (3) R is multi OS (4) R language is reasonbly stable; thus something developed today may last for many many years indently of OS updates or Software updates (5) R has a core team that develop the software itself thus contributers may concentrate efforts in the extension codes and not in the software core, and OS integration. (6) There hundreds of maintainers and contributers thus it is a solid development that even has a early congress for users (7) It is possible, and there is many examples, to create a friendly graphical interface for epidemiologic users (8) There is already many functions directed to epidemiologic users such as epidemic curves, tables in stack form etc
Thus I would not be surprised if one day EpiData friends also start an integration with R, as already has been done for SAS, SPSS, WinBugs, SQL, MySQL etc etc and more recently it seems that epiinfo too.
Best regards to all,
Abraço forte e que a força esteja com você,
Dr. Pedro Emmanuel A. A. do Brasil Instituto de Pesquisa Clínica Evandro Chagas Fundação Oswaldo Cruz Rio de Janeiro - Brasil Av. Brasil 4365 Tel 55 21 3865-9648 email: pedro.brasil@ipec.fiocruz.br email: emmanuel.brasil@gmail.com
---Apoio aos softwares livres www.zotero.org - gerenciamento de referências bibliográficas. www.broffice.org ou www.openoffice.org - textos, planilhas ou apresentações. www.epidata.dk - entrada de dados. www.r-project.org - análise de dados. www.ubuntu.com - sistema operacional