From: Nuralanur@...
Date: 2006-07-05T04:05:10+09:00
Subject: Re: ed borasky and his second favourite programming language

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Dear Ed,
 
thank you for your reply - it crossed my reply to Matthew, so I'll update  my 
statement
by saying that my question "why does Ed Borasky" like R is now answered and  
in
a very informative way.
 
I am a mathematician myself, and I'll agree that in the field of biological  
modelling, where
I am working in, there's a lot of statistics, and of course I knew of R for  
doing
statistics, and i like it so again: no criticism of R.
My point was just that what I like about R needn't have any connection with  
what
you like about R - otherwise there'd one important reason less maintain  
mailing lists.
 
For instance, I don't agree with your point
 
Well, first of all, being a mathematician, I'll make the claim  that
*any* sufficiently large task, programming or otherwise, has  *some*
statistics in it. :). 
 
There's graph theory, group theory, combinatorics ,.....
If you do solving of polynomial equations in many variables, to model  a 
problem
of this field, you can use Groebner bases I was talking about in my  last 
email.
The problem is that generically, the result you'll get is of twice  
exponential
complexity in the number of input variables, that is to say, you'll
get to order of 2^(2^(n/2))) terms as a result, where n is the number of  
input
variables as a worst case. This will eat up all your memory, no matter  how
much you have. A lot of work is going on to reduce that number , and  this
requires a lot of programming.
 
But I value your response and I'll think about it in the near future, when  I 
come
back to using R.
 
Best regards,
 
Axel 
 

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