Re:R is hot [pdf]
by hadley on Friday January 25, 2013 @09:11AM
(#5115452)
I think the best thing that could happen would be the development of a competing R implementation. In my mind this would include the definition of a minimal R language implemented in something like Riposte (http://www.justintalbot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pact0...), and the majority of base code written either in R, or the sort of C++ that Rcpp makes very natural.
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The best thing that can happen to R would be to rewrite the parser in Haskell and make R a domain specific language. Leave the stats/R language to statisticians who originally designed R, and bring in the Comp Sci crowd to actually make a meaningful speedup.
That's an unusual suggestion - I haven't heard anyone complain about R's parser before. It's also hard to argue that R is a DSL (at least in the spirit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language). There are many features of R, features that make it particularly well suited to statistics and data analysis, that would be very difficult to reproduce in an embedded DSL (missing values are one particularly important example)
Julia is meant to be a competitor to R. The Julia developer community have added dataframes to compete with R Datasets and packages.
See: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?hi... and: http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/?hi...
Re:R is hot [pdf]
by saosebastiao on Friday January 25, 2013 @10:41PM
(#5119135)
Interesting. First time I have heard of Riposte. It dousn't sound like a new language though, but rather a new runtime. Am I understanding incorrectly?