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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Boeing uses Julia somewhere for its computations... and they have extensive testing to support that. I recall when the PR folks at SAS, a statistical tool, said that nobody would trust a Boeing plane that had been developed using R (an open source alternative to SAS), and Boeing replied that they used R to design airplanes.

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Besides that the SAS vs R is something still ongoing. I heard the aame point made in favour of SAS in Public Health, Clinical trials analysis and set up and different public administration. They trust the algorithms provided by a closed source certified vendors and not an open source alternative.

At the same time, correct implementation of statistics is hard and testing it to be correct is harder.

the story you heard about health is exactly backward. I had also heard that FDA approvals depended on SAS, but I spoke more recently with somebody who does this and it turns out both the submittors and the FDA use R, not SAS. There have definitely been communities of stats people who "trust" only certain codes or routines, but generally, the trend has been towards open implementations of the code, as it allows more experts to inspect the workings when they detect problems.

There are working groups under the R Consortium umbrella that work on FDA-related tasks with a focus on R [0]. Folks from the pharma industry and FDA are involved.

One of the working groups is dedicated toward submissions: R Submissions Working Group [1]. They recently announced: "The R Consortium is happy to announce that on Nov 22nd, 2021, the R Submissions Working Group successfully submitted an R-based test submission package through the FDA eCTD gateway! The submission package has been received by the FDA staff who were able to reproduce the numerical results." [2]

[0] https://www.r-consortium.org/all-projects/isc-working-groups

[1] https://rconsortium.github.io/submissions-wg/

[2] https://www.r-consortium.org/blog/2021/12/08/successful-r-ba...

Preach but I should have added than my experience was not in the US but in Europe.

Well, it's also not like Boeing didn't have some major engineering f*ups in recent years, but we're going on a tangent here.

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