-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Gabor
Grothendieck
Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 8:06 AM
To: Andy Bunn
Cc: R-Help
Subject: Re: [R] congratulations to the JGR developers
On 5/2/05, Andy Bunn <abunn at whrc.org> wrote:
Just want to offer my congratulations to the JGR
This feels like the future of R to me. It's simple, powerful, and
elegant just like R. As soon as the binary that works with 2.1 is
released I'll use it exclusively on Linux and Windows. I'm
deeply impressed.
I have not tried JGR but regarding your three adjective
describing R, R is very powerful but I am not sure I would
characterize it as simple and elegant -- complex and
practical seem nearer to the mark to me.
Some parts of R may be simple and elegant but when I think of
simple and elegant languages I think of ones that are
organized around a
single concept like APL (arrays), Smalltalk (objects), etc.
The underlying
Lisp roots of R may have a certain simplicity to them and S3
(though not
S4) is relatively simple but not R as a whole. On the other
hand, the fact that it is practical, powerful and free with a
broad set of builtin and addon functionality and has become a
de facto standard for statistical research have been
sufficient reason for me to do all my computing using R.