masked marvel is out

R version 3.0.0, codename masked marvel, is now ready for download! (link)  See the newest iteration of the open-source community's beloved environment for statistics computing and graphics. (homepage) The stable version was officially released on April 3, 2013.


I've been waiting for this for the past few months. I've been number-crunching during January to March using version2.15, and I was hesitant to download v2.16, because I knew for a fact that v3.0 is due for release this year. I had difficulty using certain packages, such as randomForest, because they won't work on v2.15.

So here now my patience has paid off, and such a great timing this was: school year's almost over, and I can install the software and upgrade packages to my heart's content. I have all the time that I need.

Professor Peter Dalgaard of the Copenhagen Business School precisely wrote, in behalf of the R core team, in his letter to the community mailing list saying that R v3.0.0 is not so much about adding a lot of new features from v2.0 iterations, but rather it was decided that the codebase has "developed to a new level of maturity" that warrants a major release.


Version 3.0.0, as of this writing, contains only really major new feature: The inclusion of long vectors... More changes are likely to make it into the final release, but the main reason for having it as a new major release is that R over the last 8.5 years has reached a new level: we now have 64 bit support on all platforms, support for parallel processing, the Matrix package, and much more.
 Thank you R core team! Happy data crunching.

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