In the beginning...
Posted by Kelsie Ferin
Blog #6:
This week, we were told to read the article R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics and write an interesting blog about it. Ihaka and Gentleman begin by discussing the origin of the language R. I was completely unaware that this language was derived from two existing languages, S and Scheme (which I also did not know existed). I found it interesting that the also named this new language R since it heavily relied on S; I was always curious as to why they named this program R! They incorporated the evaluation model of Scheme with the syntax of S to create this new program. It is mentioned that this structure provides statistician a comfortable environment to work in. When I think of how I will use R, the first thing that comes to mind is to statistically analyze my data that I am using for my research. It makes me feel better knowing that this is exactly what they had in mind when creating the program. Since I have only worked with MATLAB and briefly with SAS, I was not exactly sure what an “environment” was or how it worked. Ihaka and Gentleman do a great job at describing that an environment is basically the same as the “work space” that MATLAB uses. The environment stores everything that will be needed to evaluate something. Also, I have never heard the term “frames” before reading this article. They describe frames to be a list of symbol or value pairs. While I am comparing MATLAB to R, both of these languages are using functions. Through all of the programming languages that I have used, this seems to be a common theme. Functions make my life easier because when I am trying to do something (basically almost anything), someone else somewhere has probably done this before and created a function to do so. In R, you can download these packages with functions within to make your programming life easier! One big difference between MATLAB and R that I have noticed is that R likes to use “<-“ and “->” to create variables rather than an “=”. We talked about this in lecture and learned that R uses this because of the keyboard that they used while creating this program! Even though I am not used to R, the more I am learning about it, the more excited I am getting about using. Once benefit of me switching from MATLAB to R is that once I leave an academic setting, MATLAB becomes very costly and R is free.
