R Throwdown Challenge

theodp (442580) writes "'R beats Python!' screams the headline at Prof. Norm Matloff's Mad (Data) Scientist blog. 'R beats Julia! Anyone else wanna challenge R?' Not that he has anything against Python, Matloff adds, but he just doesn't believe that Python or Julia will become 'the new R' anytime soon, or ever. Why? 'R is written by statisticians, for statisticians,' explains Matloff. 'It matters. An Argentinian chef, say, who wants to make Japanese sushi may get all the ingredients right, but likely it just won't work out quite the same. Similarly, a Pythonista could certainly cook up some code for some statistical procedure by reading a statistics book, but it wouldn't be quite same. It would likely be missing some things of interest to the practicing statistician. And R is Statistically Correct.'"

Comments

Re:Bad analogy

[Glock27]

Exactly. Julia will eat R for lunch soon enough, I think. It's an elegant, well designed and efficient language. It's only been around for a couple of years, and has a very vibrant and rapidly growing community.

Check it out for yourself: The Julia Language Homepage. It's got a lot to offer anyone with an interest in mathematics, including statisticians. It's based on the LLVM, and interfaces trivially with C libraries - plus it's a very fast language in it's own right, unlike R or Python.

Re:Bad analogy

[retchdog]

my friend uses julia, and every few weeks complains about some bug. the other day he mentioned that the latest release broke Bernoulli sampling (wtf?). the others have been pretty fundamental too.

this is a serious problem, of course. the other one is lack of libraries. R is an abysmal pile of shit, but at least it's a standard; pretty much 95%+ of applied stats is at least partially supported by someone's hacked-up library/package. julia is far, far short of that, and it appears that much of its community is more interested in pretty graphics, meta-wankery, and interface methodology than actual working statistics (not that there's anything wrong with that per se).

yeah, yeah, "fix it yourself," and it's on my list to write at least a basic survival analysis package for it. but i wouldn't blame anyone for not using it, and i wouldn't recommend it for doing stats as it is now.