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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

#21

Post by _delirium »

muuh-gnu wrote: post #11
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/

Ihaka himself seems to be eyeing with Common Lisp as the next best statistical environment: http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Compstat-2...

Lisp-Stat used to be a big deal in the late-80s/early-90s, and had a shot at becoming the dominant open-source statistics package inspired by Bell Labs S. It eventually lost mindshare to R, though, and was pretty solidly eclipsed by the late 1990s. It'd be interesting if the R developer responds by trying to build something like Lisp-Stat again. ;-)

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

#23

Post by bigfudge »

ewjordan wrote: post #10
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 alread…

Perhaps I'm wrong, but scipy and numpy seem to do a lot of what they want, and if they started there a lot more of their effort could go into porting the libraries.

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

#25

Post by whyenot »

adbge wrote: post #8

> 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…

Revolution Analytics has released some extensions that are proprietary, for instance their doSMP library that provides multicore support under Windows. They have also released several of their libraries into the "commons" -- doMC and foreach are the two that immediately come to mind.

I'm sort of torn on this issue because setting aside the terms under which RA releases their libraries, what they produce comes with great documentation, and tends to be pretty useful. Using foreach and doMC I was able to cut down a calculation that normally takes 8 hours to 3 hours on a 6 core machine.

On the other hand, I strongly believe that proprietary code should be avoided when doing scientific research because it inhibits peer review and makes it harder for others to replicate your work. As Warren DeLano said: "The only way to publish software in a scientifically robust manner is to share source code, and that means publishing via the internet in an open-access/open-source fashion."

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

#26

Post by earl »

bigfudge wrote: post #23
ewjordan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alread…

Perhaps I'm wrong, but scipy and numpy seem to do a lot of what they want, and if they started there a lot more of their effort could go into porting the libraries.

Yes, but (to my shock), their speed makes even R look fast. Which I didn't think as possible. My problem was taking a matrix market formatted matrix, loading it, turning it into a sparse column vector representation, then computing norms of the columns. It was running for roughly 8 hours on 12MM columns.

R of all things was running faster.

I reimplemented in java and it takes < 1 second.

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

#27

Post by Quiark »

ewjordan wrote: post #10
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 alread…

For JVM, there is Incanter which is a statistics library written in Clojure. It is backed by Parallel Colt for the heavy number lifting. Note that I'm not trying to say that Clojure would be a scientist-friendly language :)

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

#28

Post by earl »

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…

I think the interviewee has, elsewhere, been pretty explicit about his desire for the R committee to get away from maintaining their own language and to build on a platform maintained elsewhere. Basically, it seems like he thinks R should be a package and some libraries, but not in the runtime/compiler business.

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

#29

Post by TalGalili »

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.

BTW, that was my motivation for starting the www.r-bloggers.com website. It now has over 110 bloggers (who write about R) there. When I started and looked for them on google, all I could find was bloggers who wrote about pirates :D

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

#30

Post by knowtheory »

equark wrote: post #13
ewjordan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alread…

Fear not, some of us are working on this very hard.

o? what is it that you're doing?
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