From: Giles Bowkett <gilesb@...>
Date: 2006-10-09T07:57:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Rails

On 10/8/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
> Giles Bowkett wrote:
> > Weirdly enough the only other place I've heard of R is the same place
> > this question comes from. Anyway -- I'm also wondering if this is such
> > a great thing, or just a sort of balkanization.
>
> 1. R is certainly not a "main stream" language in the sense that Perl or
> Python are. In its original form, it was an open source dialect of the S
> language. S in turn was a brilliant design by some people at Bell Labs,
> and was based on Lisp and APL in semantics. It was dedicated to
> scientific and statistical computing.
>
> However, R has evolved to the point where you can do "Perlish" things
> like regular expressions, GUIs, web servers and web applications and
> other 21st century applications without leaving the language and its
> contributed library packages. If I were starting this project over from
> scratch, it would probably be all in R rather than mostly Perl with
> escapes to R for the statistical computations and graphics.

The R folks I know do complexity theory, ABM, stuff like that.

My question may be too philosophical to have a useful answer. You
**could** write Rails in assembly if you really wanted to. The link
between a language and frameworks written in it may be too subtle to
draw useful conclusions from.

-- 
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org