The article was first announced in 2008/4/1. Here is a reprint.
The successor to the popular open source language R has been announced. It has been called “Tea”.
Tea language and the software has the following features –
1) The Tea ( pronounced ‘teah’ ) community is divided between users and developers.Users use and file tickets, developers develop and use a wiki and they use a forum software like vbulletin or PhPBB 3.0 (see http://decisionstats.com/forum/ )for posting appropriate threads.
2) It uses only GUI and menu driven features for its users. Most legacy R programs can be run in Tea, provided you click the icon for launching the command line separately ( like MS Dos and Windows). If you like command line for the love, then you should be having love ,not be having Tea.
3) You can download video tutorials of Tea shortly from www.youtube.com ( see dedicated channel for Tea Project in You Tube) and also use bit torrents to download it. Tea may be also available on Sourceforge and Downloads.com shortly. There will be no plans to create and maintain a CTAN or repository of folders around the world.Source code would be available both on Google Code as well as Microsoft Developer sites. They would also be searching for one Linux site for source code- as soon as they get all the Linuxes to agree who is going to take over the world.
4) Tea is not free, as it recognizes users have to spend a lot of time learning from its single click menu driven program, video tutorials or even search indexed help guide. Tea help is updated based on statistical analysis of usage of popular packages (using advanced analytics on the Tea wiki and the flashy website www.t-project.org)
5) Tea will cost 1 dollars for download (refundable within a month). Money will go to someday One laptop per child which will have Tea pre installed.In addition the Tea project will work with laptop manufacturers like Dell, Compaq and IBM/Lenovo and Acer for pre installation of Tea with its Tea Excel ,Tea Web (especially for the net books)and Tea Core builds.
Note from Ajay- I tried to arrange an interview but surprisingly the Tea Core Team wont be giving interviews to anyone.Apart from the New York T of course.
Note-This is not to be confused with the Template Language developed by the University of North Carolina at http://www.sdsc.edu/srb/index.php/T_Language
