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I think the best thing that could happen would be the development of a competing R implementation. In my mind this would include the definition of a minimal R l

by hadley 14y ago

I think the best thing that could happen would be the development of a competing R implementation. In my mind this would include the definition of a minimal R language implemented in something like Riposte (http://www.justintalbot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pact080talbot.pdf http://www.justintalbot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pact0...), and the majority of base code written either in R, or the sort of C++ that Rcpp makes very natural.

chuckbone 14y ago
The best thing that can happen to R would be to rewrite the parser in Haskell and make R a domain specific language. Leave the stats/R language to statisticians who originally designed R, and bring in the Comp Sci crowd to actually make a meaningful speedup.
- hadley 14y ago
  That's an unusual suggestion - I haven't heard anyone complain about R's parser before. It's also hard to argue that R is a DSL (at least in the spirit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language). There are many features of R, features that make it particularly well suited to statistics and data analysis, that would be very difficult to reproduce in an embedded DSL (missing values are one particularly important example)
simulate 14y ago
Julia is meant to be a competitor to R. The Julia developer community have added dataframes to compete with R Datasets and packages. See: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?highlight=dataframes#id83 http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?hi... and: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?highlight=dataframes#id27 http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?hi...
saosebastiao 14y ago
Interesting. First time I have heard of Riposte. It dousn't sound like a new language though, but rather a new runtime. Am I understanding incorrectly?

by hadley 14y ago

chuckbone 14y ago

The best thing that can happen to R would be to rewrite the parser in Haskell and make R a domain specific language. Leave the stats/R language to statisticians who originally designed R, and bring in the Comp Sci crowd to actually make a meaningful speedup.

hadley 14y ago
That's an unusual suggestion - I haven't heard anyone complain about R's parser before. It's also hard to argue that R is a DSL (at least in the spirit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language). There are many features of R, features that make it particularly well suited to statistics and data analysis, that would be very difficult to reproduce in an embedded DSL (missing values are one particularly important example)

simulate 14y ago

Julia is meant to be a competitor to R. The Julia developer community have added dataframes to compete with R Datasets and packages. See: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?highlight=dataframes#id83 http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?hi... and: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?highlight=dataframes#id27 http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?hi...

saosebastiao 14y ago

Interesting. First time I have heard of Riposte. It dousn't sound like a new language though, but rather a new runtime. Am I understanding incorrectly?