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I personally do very well with Clojure / Incanter While I must admit I never worked with R (so I don't know what incanter is lacking), I do know that whatever

I personally do very well with Clojure / Incanter While I must admit I never worked with R (so I don't know what incanter is lacking), I do know that whatever problem needs solving, it won't be hard to solve in Clojure. Two specific advantages of Clojure / Incanter are the clojure-inherent concurrency stuff plus access to all Java libs.

ska 12y ago
One of his main points is about specific statistical codes being done properly. In other words, yes, it will be hard to solve in Clojure. It was hard to solve in other lisps, it was hard to solve in fortran, and it will be hard to solve in any other language you pick... unless someone else has already done the heavy lifting. This isn't the sort of thing you whip up in any language, good numerical analysis libraries are typically often decades of work by people with specialized backgrounds.
- shoo 12y ago
  when i was using R a few years ago, a number of the packages i was most fond of were themselves at least partially implemented in C++ / Fortran. e.g. `gbm` is pretty much a C++ project. `randomForest` now appears to contain a fair bit of R code, but it still has the (original?) fortran routines for tree construction, as well as C code wrapping the fortran. https://github.com/harrysouthworth/gbm https://github.com/harrysouthworth/gbm http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/randomForest/index.html http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/randomForest/index.ht...
  - ska 12y ago
    Interesing. I'm not familiar with how much of the R library is implemented in R, I expect some of it is tried and tested fortran because it's a waste of time to reimplement. My comment was really addressing "it won't be hard to solve in Clojure.". Some things are just hard to get right, period.
- terranstyler 12y ago
  I think we have a misunderstanding here. I am not saying "every statistical problem can be solved efficiently, numerically stable, ... in clojure" (and I realize you may read my comment like that), but rather most of the critical stuff is provided by incanter and the rest you can do yourself in clojure. As a side note: Incanter also has some fortran dependencies, sot he critical stuff is also not done in clojure.
  - ska 12y ago
    That makes sense.

ska 12y ago

One of his main points is about specific statistical codes being done properly. In other words, yes, it will be hard to solve in Clojure. It was hard to solve in other lisps, it was hard to solve in fortran, and it will be hard to solve in any other language you pick... unless someone else has already done the heavy lifting. This isn't the sort of thing you whip up in any language, good numerical analysis libraries are typically often decades of work by people with specialized backgrounds.

shoo 12y ago
when i was using R a few years ago, a number of the packages i was most fond of were themselves at least partially implemented in C++ / Fortran. e.g. `gbm` is pretty much a C++ project. `randomForest` now appears to contain a fair bit of R code, but it still has the (original?) fortran routines for tree construction, as well as C code wrapping the fortran. https://github.com/harrysouthworth/gbm https://github.com/harrysouthworth/gbm http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/randomForest/index.html http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/randomForest/index.ht...
- ska 12y ago
  Interesing. I'm not familiar with how much of the R library is implemented in R, I expect some of it is tried and tested fortran because it's a waste of time to reimplement. My comment was really addressing "it won't be hard to solve in Clojure.". Some things are just hard to get right, period.
terranstyler 12y ago
I think we have a misunderstanding here. I am not saying "every statistical problem can be solved efficiently, numerically stable, ... in clojure" (and I realize you may read my comment like that), but rather most of the critical stuff is provided by incanter and the rest you can do yourself in clojure. As a side note: Incanter also has some fortran dependencies, sot he critical stuff is also not done in clojure.
- ska 12y ago
  That makes sense.