S-Plus 8 goes to Beta

Unusually for this part of the software industry, Insightful are being very public about the timing of the beta program for S-Plus 8, which is planned to run from now until August. So one might expect a quarter-4 release of this popular statistics software.

The feature list which will include:
-A new package mechanism for the distribution of addons.
-A collection of new statistics functions.
-A debugger in the Eclipse based workbench.

The package mechanism turns out to be a port of existing functionality in the R language (the open source cousin of S-Plus), and seems to be a move to get closer to the large R community and existing R resources.

The Eclipse debugger is already widely used by developers in other languages and so adding support for S-Plus will be beneficial to many. The Eclipse project has a lot of momentum behind it, and for Insightful to extend their use of it seems sensible.