From: Matthew Smillie Date: 2006-07-05T01:47:54+09:00 Subject: Re: ed borasky and his second favourite programming language On Jul 4, 2006, at 17:03, Nuralanur@aol.com wrote: > Thank you, Paul, for the link. > Assuming that Ara's link to Ed Borasky's opinions also makes the > case for R, > I've two questions: > > obviously, you can like features of R very much, but what do you do > if the code you have to write doesn't have anything to do with > statistics? Presumably, if you don't just use R, you use your second-favourite language. You're allowed to use more than one, you know. > What are the nice features of R that make it superior to Ruby in Ed > Borasky's opinion - and do we agree with him ? I can't speak for Ed, but for me (I use it as well), it does precisely what it needs to do, and it does it succinctly and well. Which, not coincidentally, are the same reasons I use Ruby for the things I use Ruby for, and the same reasons I use Prolog for the things I use Prolog for. > Ruby is "more general" than R (since there are bindings for R > available), > and there are also bindings to other scientific programs/packages > e.g., GSL > (if you want to to do numerical integration or random number > generation). But what does this statement mean? Simply being "more general" (which I'll just accept for now, even though the definition seems a little wishy-washy) doesn't get you anywhere. Being better at particular tasks is what wins. > I think one should compare languages that do about the same things > with respect to how they do it. That might be interesting for its own sake, but it doesn't really teach us anything about the languages being compared. Languages are just tools, and not all tools are meant to do the same things. This one drives nails, this one turns screws, this one calculates eigenvectors, and this one makes foxes eat bacon. Knowing those aspects of a language are much more valuable than, say, knowing which one is faster at a 'hello world' web application. matthew smillie.