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Perhaps that's because I'm a programmer, and Python is a general purpose programming language.

Exactly. You shouldn't have to be a programmer to do statistics. Just like you shouldn't have to be a network engineer to share files. What if DropBox had stuff in there about http, ports, levels of service, bandwidth, etc... You'd probably say, "Great! I always wnated to specify that DropBox use SSL4.7 draft B over CDMA EvoX.1 -- who wouldn't?"

When you're doing a DSL make it is as simple as possible. And if you have time, in v2, give it hooks to just break out and do crazy stuff... but the 90% case should be simple as pi.

There are GUI statistics apps for people who just want the common case, Dropbox-style: packages like Weka for data mining / predictive statistics, SPSS for descriptive statistics, and a dozen other such things.

The statisticians who choose to use a programming language like R or Python typically do it because they actually do want a programming language. I mean, that's why Bell Labs statisticians invented S (R's predecessor) to begin with.

Right. I wasn't saying that there didn't exist such packages, of course there are. I was pointing out that the reason a programming language looks good to a programmer and not a statistician is due domain expertise. And of course the common trap programmers fall into is assuming the domain is programming.

And don't lump R in with Python. And good statistician would have your neck. You mention S, but again S doesn't look anything like Python either.

I only see him "lumping R in with Python" in that they're both full-blown programming languages and TFAA apparently hates them both because they're programming languages.

_delirium is merely pointing out that there are push-button packages for statistics, and that statisticians using programming languages (be they statistics-oriented or not) usually do so because they want to or because they need to (as the push-button stuff is not sufficient for their needs, for instance)

I am a statistician that does both research and applied work.

I use R for three reasons: (1) It's Free Software; (2) It's a programming language; (3) Other statisticians use it so it's easier for me to collaborate.

There are the usual supporting arguments for (1). (2), I've only used SAS a little bit, and it was extremely unpleasant to use it for non-built-in stuff, which makes research harder for no good reason. For (3), I have nothing against Python but most other statisticians don't use it. If I want to share my work in R, it's easy (statisticians know how to install R packages). If I want to share my work in Python, I first have to teach [most] other statisticians how to use Python. There's nothing wrong with that, but why raise the start-up cost for them?

tl;dr I conjecture that most statisticians don't want what the author is suggesting. Also, there are plenty of companies that are trying to do what the author is asking for, but most of them seem to miss the desired sweet spot, or charge lots of money, or both. I haven't taken a survey of the available software in quite some time.

can you reccomend a book to get started with r?

No, but I can give some suggestions. It would help to know what you want to do.

First of all, you need to decide if you want a language reference, or an application guide, as R books fall into those two categories.

If you have a specific type of work in mind (bio-informatics, data mining, data visualization, ...) I'd say to find a book that focuses on that topic. I haven't looked in a while, but I haven't seen a general R book that I like, anything I suggest there would be guessing on my part.

There are plenty of good references on the web. I'd start by looking at the material available from the R web site:

R's core manuals [1] are typically correct and reasonable to use. The "Introduction to R" guide will get you up to speed fairly well if you already know another programming language. There is also the contributed documentation [2]. I haven't gone through these, so I can't say much about them, or promise that they are up-to-date. I suspect not, as R develops rapidly. The one reference I can recommend highly is "The R Inferno" by Patrick Burns [3]. This is not a starter guide, but something you read after one. It gives excellent advice on avoiding common pitfalls in R.

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html

[2] http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html

[3] http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

Thanks. I do biology with limited amount of data and my needs are very basic. Here is a software I wrote to do sleep analysis in Drosophila: http://www.pysolo.net

So far I could satisfy most of my statistics needs with the function in numpy and scipy but occasionally I need to do something slightly more fancy and R I guess is the way to go.

Possibly. R is really great at doing "fancy" statistical analyses. It's very lousy at doing things like text manipulation. When I have a project that needs some text manipulation on the front end, I frequently use other tools (Python, vi, sed, ...) on the front end to beat text data into a nicer form for R. I couldn't say without knowing more about your project.

Here's a site I always go to for reference: http://statmethods.net/

If you really want a book I would recommend "Data Analysis and Graphics Using R" by Maindonald and Braun, http://books.google.com/books?id=d7OeVD6SKBsC.

I always seem to come back to "Introductory Statistics With R".[1] It gives a lot of examples of how to do "the day-to-day stuff". Also, since, as the title suggests, the statistical contents are mostly (very) introductory in nature, it's really easy for me as a reader to decipher what's going on in each example- it's easy to tell which parts are specific to the example itself and which parts are generic to R, if that makes any sense.

[1] http://www.powells.com/biblio/65-9780387790534-0

That looks close to as simple as possible, if you assume Python is to be used. My point about R was that even in a language designed for statistics, I saw dependence on common programming concepts.

It reminds me of Stata, which is has a fairly better syntax than SAS.

(Eg: the weird SAS code gets replaced by something as simple as tabulate x y)

I'm pretty sure that Python makes a lot more sense to mathematicians than the special purpose syntax of SAS. List comprehensions: mathematicians use set comprehensions all the time. First class functions: same.

If you just need graphs and pivot tables, use some GUI tool.

I also prefer this python code to the SAS example listed. I have been trying to brush up on statistics over the last couple of years and I think this article points to an issue that occurred to me. Namely that when somebody says they "know statistics" it sort of has to mean that they know one of the big stats packages out there. It doesn't appear that anybody is really doing stats from first principles anymore. It seems like there are differences in terminology between one author and another and now with the different programing models there is a whole new level of incompatibility.

>Python statistical code looks too much like Python. Which, yeah, it does. Python is a general purpose programming language, not a domain specific language for statistical programming.

I have to agree (with your criticism). I spend most of my day in SAS and R, and my Python is limited to tweaking code from my colleagues, but I don't see how either the SAS or Python listed is better or worse than the other.

I actually like the quote in the article reg. DropBox's simplicity, but I don't get the relationship to statistical programming languages.

Picking on Python for not having simpler built-in ways to do domain-specific statistical operations seems rather silly to me.

I've been involved the last few years with creating better data structures and tools for doing statistics in Python-- with excellent results (http://pandas.sourceforge.net and http://statsmodels.sourceforge.net). So I think the author should take a closer look at some of the libraries and tools out there.

I think his point here is that the most visible aspects of the code are the structures built up to do the computation, rather than the computation itself. As a description of a generator loop, it reads quite nicely. But the language does not give much ground to the topic it's describing, in the way (to use the obvious example) Lisp would. I think that's what he is getting at.

Yes, I like the Python also, but you have missed the point. For MBA-types, business types, and scientists the programming concepts are too much to learn. Why should they have to learn programming when their needs are simple? It is not just "keep it simple", it is "keep it simple" for non-programmers.

Maybe I'm missing the point too, because I don't understand why he's arguing that Python and R should cater to people that don't want to use a programming language. Isn't that akin to arguing that C is too complicated because it allows you to directly access memory rather than abstracting that away?

MBA- and business types have Excel. As a researcher, I flex both Python and R regulary -- but I want the full power of a programming language, not a couple of macros to generate a pivot table.

Agree with this point. I'm both MBA/bizdev and software engineer. When putting on my MBA hat and working on sales forecast, decision making models, spread sheet is all I use. It is quick, tweakable, super easy to share. Whereas building my site which focuses on market research services, I resorted to C and existing stats packages cause they are powerful, more flexible, and basically programmable. To me what MBA/bizdev people need is significantly different from what a software developer writing stats-related code need. It is a very different scenario from the dropbox story...

The point was if you want to help a large number of people with their statistical problems, the basics should be really simple (like dropbox).

I understand that point. My point was that a Python library for statistics is not the right tool for them, but that in no way makes that statistic library or Python "bad." Python is a programming language. If you think that the users you have in mind can't handle programming, then don't give them a programming language.

You are right. Python and R are not the right tool for them. They are not "dropbox" simple. Er, wait ...

A) Any half-competent scientist is comfortable programming. B) Some programming is even required in a lot of undergrad business/MBA programs C) What the author really means by "MBA-types" are morons. So, yes there is a market for an user-friendly domain specific statistical language. It's called SAS. It's expensive. But it does the thinking for you...if you're a moron.

Also, none of this has anything to do with Python, which is an absolutely beautiful language.