Thursday, January 08, 2009
R - New Language for Non-Programmers?
We always here about how this or that new language is the latest hot thing, but NYT has an article on how a rising language called R is fast becoming the language of choice for non-programmers dealing with data mining and statistics. Anybody used this language, and have any personal insights into this?
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2 comments:
Yes -- I have used R. It is a statistical programming language like SAS. Actually -- it is kind of like the Open Source version of S (or S-Plus) since the syntax is almost the same: but I think the core has been re-written and does not share any code with S-Plus (quite like the relationship between UNIX and Linux). R is very powerful and has great analysis and even graphing abilities. The only issue I have run into with R is that it chokes when given huge amounts of data (unlike SAS or SPSS that are able to handle terabytes). I read that this is because R is highly object oriented and all data has to be structured into objects that are held in memory.
On the other hand, R is certainly not a substitute for C, C++, Perl, Python or Java: its use is restricted to statistical programming.
I think I overdid it when I said that SAS and SPSS can deal with terabytes of data: gigabytes would be more correct.
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