4 ms·

R already has a failed lisp predecessor: XLISP-STAT. I don't know that it was bad at all - it was developed by one of the core developers of R and by all accoun

R already has a failed lisp predecessor: XLISP-STAT. I don't know that it was bad at all - it was developed by one of the core developers of R and by all accounts was numerically superior. I believe the conclusion regarding its demise was that lisp syntax just does not appear to captivate a large enough audience.

peatmoss 8y ago
I’ve wondered out loud a few times whether Racket’s language-oriented could facilitate even better / more natural DSLs than R. R has lots of little DSLs that reduces the cognitive burden of doing stats for people more concerned with applied research than programming. XLisp-Stat’s syntax barrier might have been overcome by better DSLs. In the case of Racket, creating new syntaxes isn’t a barrier, though if someone needed to break out of the functionality of your DSL, they’d be right back to Racket (or some other equivalently expressive language like typed-racket or rackjure). Projects like Julia are neat because they’re researching the possibility of building a high level language that obviates resorting to C, C++, and Fortran when speed is needed. Equally interesting, but less sexy, is figuring out the human interaction aspect of statistical computing. R is a somewhat organic language that has evolved (and in the case of Tidyverse researched and engineered) DSLs. I’d love to see what stats savvy computer scientists could do with Racket to rethink or improve stats DSLs. If I were a tenured prof with time and research money, I’d surely explore this question. Put another way, I think Julia is tackling numerical and statistical computing the XBox / Playstation way: pushing the state of the art in performance. I think there’s room for a Nintendo approach that speaks to the humans using the system rather than optimizing the technical bit.

4 ms·

R already has a failed lisp predecessor: XLISP-STAT. I don't know that it was bad at all - it was developed by one of the core developers of R and by all accoun

by hatmatrix 8y ago

peatmoss 8y ago
I’ve wondered out loud a few times whether Racket’s language-oriented could facilitate even better / more natural DSLs than R. R has lots of little DSLs that reduces the cognitive burden of doing stats for people more concerned with applied research than programming. XLisp-Stat’s syntax barrier might have been overcome by better DSLs. In the case of Racket, creating new syntaxes isn’t a barrier, though if someone needed to break out of the functionality of your DSL, they’d be right back to Racket (or some other equivalently expressive language like typed-racket or rackjure). Projects like Julia are neat because they’re researching the possibility of building a high level language that obviates resorting to C, C++, and Fortran when speed is needed. Equally interesting, but less sexy, is figuring out the human interaction aspect of statistical computing. R is a somewhat organic language that has evolved (and in the case of Tidyverse researched and engineered) DSLs. I’d love to see what stats savvy computer scientists could do with Racket to rethink or improve stats DSLs. If I were a tenured prof with time and research money, I’d surely explore this question. Put another way, I think Julia is tackling numerical and statistical computing the XBox / Playstation way: pushing the state of the art in performance. I think there’s room for a Nintendo approach that speaks to the humans using the system rather than optimizing the technical bit.