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Comment by showerst | Hacker News Reader

Having only very minimal experience with R, I get the impression that while python is fantastic for programmers, and the tools are probably close to or better than R's (no idea about library support), it's still a programming language, and requires one to think and structure things like a programmer.

R, at least in the beginning, comes across more like a powerful set of Excel formulas, so I think a non-programmer might pick it up faster without having good programming form.

(Not to say one is more powerful than the other, or that R programmers aren't as good as Python programmers, etc, I just think it's a difference in community viewpoints)

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R is not at all like Excel, in form or function. R is actually a complete programming language, much more similar to Python in that respect. It supports two types of OOP (S3 and S4), has hundreds (if not more) of contributed packages that do things like survival analysis, 2D/3D plotting, bioinformatics, machine learning, Bayesian statistics, econometrics, numerical integration, spatial statistics, and more (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/)

One major advantage over Python is that it's vectorised, so you can say things like A + 1 when A is a vector (or matrix). A bit like Matlab in that regard, only that it doesn't suck as much as the Matlab ``language''.

"One major advantage over Python is that it's vectorised, so you can say things like A + 1 when A is a vector (or matrix). A bit like Matlab in that regard, only that it doesn't suck as much as the Matlab ``language''."

This is not very accurate. NumPy / SciPy provide vectorized matrix libraries, significantly faster than both R and Matlab for matrix operations. No argument though that Matlab as a language truly sucks =)

Well, I don't how NumPy can be significantly faster than R, as R basically passes most linear algebra down to BLAS and LAPACK. NumPy does the same, no?

Yes, NumPy does the same.

it strikes me that it would be pretty trivial to implement such syntax in smalltalk seeing as whitespace is not an issue and you can implement operators how you please per class. Or even better yet an "array based language" like Nial would be a good fit as well (think apl/j but with out the "thats just noise" readability issue)

back in uni, i used matlab everyday couple years ago, it was that function is file, so if i have 100 functions, i must have 100 files in a directory

i find that too limiting, found python+numarray+matplotlib and never looked at matlab ever since ... never regret

ironically i got a phone interview request from matlab at the end that year (i was on vacation, never got to that)

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