As you probably all know, Cantor currently has 4 available Backends: Sage, Maxima, KAlgebra and R. While the first 2 are in pretty good shape, as they are what I mainly use, and KAlgebra is maintained by apol, the R backend of Cantor is still lagging behind.
It started out as an afternoon hacking rush, and hasn’t changed much ever since. Mostly because I don’t have much usage for it at the moment.
While it does support the basics (running a command and showing the results) it does miss a lot of the nice features, Cantor is offering, like Tab-Completion, Syntax Highlighting or Assistant dialogs.
The feedback I got for Cantor so far tells that quite some people want to use R as backend, so I feel a bit bad that it is only a second class citizen in the family.
So I’m looking out for some help making the R support as good as the other backends (or even better). If you are a developer with needs for a nice statistical app and looking for a new challenge, please drop me a mail, and join the Cantor development.
arieder's Blog 
which reminds me that I should polish the Qalculate backend and try to get it upstream for 4.5 😉
Hope someone steps up for the R backend. Cantor is really an awesome project!
I will pass this information on to Dirk Eddelbuettel, he is a big R person and the maintainer of R in Debian. Maybe he can lend a hand or find someone who can. I know he is a KDE user too, so that helps 🙂
If you, or someone else, would be willing to be a mentor, this could be one of the project ideas that should be added to Google Summer of Code 2010 ideas list: http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2010/Ideas
Please please please! A KDE app that supports R is awesome! Unfortunately I am not a developer, but if you need any UI help give me a ping 😉
A KDE app for R programming already exists, it’s RKWard.
It works fairly well as an IDE for R usage.
Hey, talked to Dirk really quick via email this evening and he replied with the following:
—-
So this project may
a) want to look at my project RIsnide for embedding R in C++ apps
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rinside.htm
b) want to register for R’s GSoC 2010 for which I am admin at
http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=developers:projects:gsoc2010
(but we’d need to find a willing mentor…). By the same token maybe KDE’s GSoC would also fit.
funny thing, the current R implementation is already heavily based on code from RInside.
I’ve added the project to the KDE GSoc page. I guess i could do the Mentoring for the Cantor part, but maybe some Co-Mentor from the R project would be nice.
RKWard is so feature rich. Just look at the screenshots.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php
It would need a lot of work to be up and running at that pace.
rkward-0.5.3 (released April, 30, 2010) Just have a look (even for ideas).
Can’t both these projects collaborate? KParts anyone?