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The Power of the R Programming Language

Posted by samzenpus on from the much-better-than-Q dept.

BartlebyScrivener writes "The New York Times has an article on the R programming language. The Times describes it as: 'a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.'"

3 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. Drugs by xonar · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ...find new drugs more quickly...

    Drugs? Sign me up!

  2. How does it connect to Java? by Latent+Heat · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    One of the "secrets" I tell students about Matlab is that is Java in reality.

    On one level, Matlab, or at least the Figure Windows and M-File editor and Command Windows are written in Java and the main Matlab windows are JFrames. People talk about Java having not gotten anywhere "on the client" and "where are the Java shrinkwrap apps", but a bunch of stuff -- Matlab, Mathematica, Maple -- have GUI front-ends done in Java. You can tell because when one of these packages is slow to load, you see the "flaming coffee cup" icon on the taskbar.

    Word and even OO may not be written in Java, but for the apps in question, there is a big demand for having them on the Unices on account of the academic market for them, and Java appears to be the cross-platform GUI thingy of choice for this tier of commercial apps.

    So, is the R front end Java-based, or are they using something else to be cross-platform?

    The other thing about Matlab is that it is usable as a Java scripting environment. You can create instances of Java classes from the command window, assign these instances to Matlab variables, pass (by value) Matlab arrays in and out of Java functions without too much fuss, poke at Java class instances (that is invoke methods on them).

    You can even embed Java Swing widgets in Figure Windows, although the javacomponent Matlab command is thinly documented and perhaps not yet officially supported.

    Does R allow the same thing? How Java friendy/compatible/implemented is it?

  3. Re:Only for certain kind of analyst... by Baseman · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Do analysts who use R get better returns than those who use Excel?

    That they R :-)