>>>>> "K" == Kasper Daniel Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: K> On Oct 19, 2005, at 3:43 PM, Jeffrey J. Hallman wrote:
K> <SNIP> >> Think about it. Once you have a basic math package that can handle >> matrix >> programming and various mathematical functions, building the various >> statistical modeling tools on top of them is not that hard. What >> makes S and >> R so much better than SAS is their programmability. Smalltalk is >> like that, >> only better. >> >> >> Jeff Hallman K> I would claim that this quote kind of shows that you have no idea K> what you are talking about regarding good, debugged and trustworthy K> statistical procedures. Why do you think people are actually using R? Kasper, a few minutes spent Googling my name should disabuse you of the notion that I have no idea of what I'm talking about. But to answer your question: I think people are using R because it's readily available, with a lot of good stuff already built in. I am not suggesting that you tell undergraduate statistics students to write everything in Smalltalk, since the class libraries to support statistical programming in Smalltalk do not exist yet. What I am saying is that if you compare the languages themselves, along with their programming environments, Smalltalk is superior to R. What it lacks are class libraries implementing statistical procedures. I do maintain that those really are not that hard, once you have the matrix and math libraries. My experience with S and R goes way back to the days of blue book S version 3. S called out to C code to handle matrix and mathmetical stuff, but used S code itself to glue it all together in a somewhat object-oriented way. K> I could say "well, given an environment that could interface to C, K> building a GUI on top of that is not really that hard", but that K> would be incredible naive as well. Indeed it would be. But statistical programming is easier than that. Jeff ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
