Using R and SAS on MBP

[kwerner2]

I will be taking a statistical software class this coming fall where I will be learning how to use R and SAS. I know that some components of SPSS are windows only, so I was wondering if these other programs run smoothly on a mac? Are there any differences between running these programs on a mac vs pc?

Thanks.

 

[mobilehaathi]

R works fine; I use it all the time. I have no experience with the others.

 

[Mr. PoopyPants]

I used R for a Mathematical Finance class on my MacBook Pro and encountered no issues. Once you have all the necessary packages installed it's pretty easy.

That was definitely not my experience with MATLAB.

 

[bniu]

R is actually better on the mac side. You can also use the 64 bit version of R on Mac, which I've used to my advantage. I think once I hit 6.3 GBs of ram usage. Now if only they'd multithread it, it'd be nice to have R take full advantage of my MBP's 8 logical cores.

 

[swiftaw]

I agree, I find R for OSX much better than R for windows.

 

[crypticlineage]

As others have pointed out, R is much better on the Mac than on Windows. I would suggest installing it through Macports. I would also suggest avoiding the Gui version of R. Run R through terminal. It works beautifully.

SAS will not work on a Mac, because the SAS corporation refuses to make a new version of their software for Mac. Of course you can virtualize windows and then run it there. But it's much slower that way.

R has a steep learning curve, but it is a worthwhile investment.

 

[Hansr]

Now if only they'd multithread it, it'd be nice to have R take full advantage of my MBP's 8 logical cores.

It's already multicore aware, you just need to structure your code to work that way. There are multiple multicore packages which give you an easy syntax to use for this. Alternatives are writing functions in c++ be it compiled binaries or rcpp or compile R with intel mkl or a ublas variation.

As others have pointed out, R is much better on the Mac than on Windows. I would suggest installing it through Macports. I would also suggest avoiding the Gui version of R. Run R through terminal. It works beautifully.

I disagree, just install the normal installer package whether you prefer the GUI or not.

 

[mobilehaathi]

Not sure why one would download it through macports when a perfectly good binary can be had from http://www.r-project.org/. GUI or no is really a personal choice. I personally don't use the GUI very often, but there isn't anything bad about it.