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In R, I often can write a dozen line program that will do something incredible, but it might take an hour to hammer out those lines and cannot reconstruct them
by EzGraphs 14y ago
In R, I often can write a dozen line program that will do something incredible, but it might take an hour to hammer out those lines and cannot reconstruct them from memory because of inconsistencies in syntax. It sort of feels like a statistics DSL built on Lisp.
- pseut 14y agoR is exactly like a statistics DSL built on Lisp. The first sentences of a talk by Ihaka [1] are: > R began as an experiment in trying to use the methods of Lisp implementors to build a small testbed which could be used to trial some ideas on how a statistical environment might be built. Early on, the decision was made to use an S-like syntax. Once that decision was made, the move toward being more and more like S has been irresistible. Since I find it basically impossible to remember how 'eval', 'quote', 'substitute', etc. work in R, I suspect that the Lispers are onto something when they say that the lack of syntax in Lisp is an important feature. [1] http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Interface98.pdf http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Interface9...
- RockyMcNuts 14y agoR makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard.