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I guess I use R for the sorts of things I might use Mathematica for. Mathematica is kind of the opposite of J; with J you only have a few primitives. Mathematic
by scottlocklin 9y ago
I guess I use R for the sorts of things I might use Mathematica for. Mathematica is kind of the opposite of J; with J you only have a few primitives. Mathematica is a swiss army knife for data and math. Python is fine; I was an early adopter, I just don't have any reason to prefer it to R (package quality perhaps).
Kerf was a tough slog, but Kevin and I landed on our feet. We'll do something with the code one of these days.
- throwaway7645 9y agoAgreed on that front. I've used R & Mathematica as a swiss-army-knife for those things as well, although the stats stuff I do is a lot more basic than the stuff you do professionally. I'd like to get more proficient at J & APL, but that is a long road I've found. Glad to hear y'all found something after Kerf. I would've guessed there would be some market for a tsdb cheaper than kdb+ (what I assume y'all were trying to do). Your blog post mentioning overhyped tech really gave me a chuckle. In college I started to focus on nanotechnology before going to a career fair and talking to some companies. Thousands of students getting degrees focused on that and there are only a handful of startups hiring researchers and only so many grad-student type jobs. I had a physics professor tell me a niche field comes up like that every decade which gets a lot of funding, but essentially under delivers and dies out. I think there is some benefit to nano materials like high strength cables, but not the miracle sauce that is getting preached everywhere.
- scottlocklin 9y agoMaterial science is real; nanotech, not so much. Glad you found your way out of that dead end. I have a friend with a Ph.D. in nanotech. He is a pretty good GPU programmer.