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The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

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The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#1

Post by TalGalili »

The recent post on the shortcomings of R has attracted a huge number of readers and Ross Ihaka has now posted a detailed comment that is fairly pessimistic… Given the directions drafted in this comment from the father of R (along with Robert Gentleman), I once again re-post this comment as a main entry to advertise more broadly its contents. (Obviously, the whole debate is now far beyond my reach!)

The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka
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Re: The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#5

Post by gwern »

ghotli wrote: post #4
gwern wrote: post #3

It almost sounds like they want to switch to Haskell.

Or perhaps incanter with all it's lispy goodness. "Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics." http://incanter.org/

Wouldn't get you pervasive laziness, though I don't know whether R is lazy by default or like Clojure in that you have to ask for it.

Re: The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#6

Post by nanairo »

To be honest I've been using R a bit lately for my work and while I like it I don't find it at all innovative. That's not a criticism of R: the libraries it has are amazing, as well as the mindshare among people who care of statistics.

But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages.

So I am kind of pleased my this news... if there's gonna be a need for R to have its own language, speed seems to be the most important distinguishing feature. A bit like Fortran is still used in science.

(incidentally... don't let people tell you otherwise: Fortran(90+) is a very nice language... much more pleasurable than C to use and gives you better performance (unless you know a lot about compilers and compiling flags... but most scientist don't ^_^))

Re: The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#7

Post by nanairo »

chrismealy wrote: post #2

I would welcome a replacement for R just because the new language's name might be easier to google. I hope they don't call it Q.

Yes, please! It seems nowadays one of the most important feature in a name is to be unique from the point of view of Google. :)

(incidentally, if you are a mpaa operative, call your blockbusters with just one very generic name... a lot easier than suing half the world, and just as annoying ;) )

Re: The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#8

Post by adbge »

> The license will need to a better job of protecting work donated to the commons than GPL2 seems to have done. I’m not willing to have any more of my work purloined by the likes of Revolution Analytics, so I’ll be looking for better protection from the license (and being a lot more careful about who I work with).

Not having used R or being more than passingly familiar with it, I'm wondering if anyone could shed some light on what this is about? I notice that on the Revolution Analytics website, they are selling an "enterprise" version of R which they claim has a number of advantages over the mainstream form of R.

How exactly is a proprietary form of R even able to exist if R's codebase is GPL'd?

Re: The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#9

Post by zaphar »

gwern wrote: post #5
ghotli wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps incanter with all it's lispy goodness. "Incanter is a Clojure-based, R-like platform for statistical computing and graphics." http://incanter.org/

Wouldn't get you pervasive laziness, though I don't know whether R is lazy by default or like Clojure in that you have to ask for it.

if you use Clojures primitives you pretty much end up with laziness by default. for, map and most of the other list processing functions all return lazy lists. So while Clojure does technically require you to "turn on" laziness in most cases you'll find it's turned on already.

Re: The future of R - pessimistic thoughts by R founder Ross Ihaka

#10

Post by ewjordan »

nanairo wrote: post #6

To be honest I've been using R a bit lately for my work and while I like it I don't find it at all innovative. That's not a criticism of R: the libraries it has are amazing, as well as the mindshare among people who care of statistics. But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages. So I am kind of pleased my th…

But I wonder why R actually needs to exist as its own language. It seems it could be recast in Ruby for example or one of the latest functional languages.

Indeed - it would be a shame for them to start over from scratch and end up coming up with a brand new language, brand new syntax, brand new quirks, brand new performance problems, etc., while they could have simply searched around a bit for something that's already mature and somewhat optimized as well as suiting their needs.

If they wanted to add on to or modify an existing language (for instance, to provide more concise syntax for some of the things that are more important in statistics than in general purpose programming), that would be just fine, it could become a dialect of some other language, but starting fresh seems like an awful waste of energy...

Something that ran on the JVM would be awesome, they'd have no trouble at all rebuilding the massive library of contributions.

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