What makes R different from other programming languages?
On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 5:57 PM, Greg Snow <538280 at gmail.com> wrote:
I think the big unique thing about R is that it is both an interactive environment and a programming language. A new user can start it, enter some data, and compute same basic statics without ever "programming". A more advanced user can write their own function to automate common procedures or implement an new method. The journey from user to programmer is smoother that learning a macro language or API. Add to that the packages available (which could be programmed in other languages, but why?) and you have a very useful tool.
And note that the "rJava" package allows both way communications between R and Java (I'm ~95% sure and that seems to be all statisticians care about ;-) ) so your Java programmers can take advantage of R's libraries too. http://www.rforge.net/rJava/ Cheers, Michael
On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 1:22 PM, johannes rara <johannesraja at gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks, the audience is mainly Java developers who develop tailored software for many domains. I think that they would like to have some answers to these kind of questions: - why should I learn R? - what are the specific use cases where one might think of using R? - in which area R is good for? - how R differ from other programming and scripting languages? - etc. My intention is to convince them so that they will try R on their own, and probably in some day start using R in their projects. Best regards, -J 2012/8/20 R. Michael Weylandt <michael.weylandt at gmail.com>:
As a language, there are some nifty things about function arguments: http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/01/20/wondrous-oddities-rs-function-call-semantics. Lexical scoping + first class functions also come to mind. If we are thinking about libraries, graphics: http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/ and look into ggplot2 (including the famous facebook world map) and statistical modelling (both base and in contributed packages) What are your developers interested in and we can be more specific? Michael On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 1:02 PM, johannes rara <johannesraja at gmail.com> wrote:
My intention is to give a presentation about R programming language for software developers. I would like to ask, what are the things that make R different from other programming languages? What are the specific cases where Java/C#/Python developer might say "Wow, that was neat!"? What are the things that are easy in R, but very difficult in other programming languages (like Java)? Thanks, -J
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
______________________________________________ R-help at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
-- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. 538280 at gmail.com