Posted by Laila Puntel
R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics
How does the R language begin? That’s how Ihaka and Gentleman started the article. I love they way the authors expressed their emotional feelings attached to the R development. Apparently, R language is a magic combination between two other languages (S and Scheme). Wish I could be more familiar with this two other languages to better understand how they differ from R. The recipe to create R was based on the similar language as S and the implementation and semantics from Scheme. Now I understand better, this is exactly why R is a great environment to work in!!!
I am really impressed about all the aspects that the authors had into account when they created R and the criteria that they used to make comparison with the other programs. Some of the aspects, like for example, trying to look at the performance of the software base on the time used by the CPU when running different software…They concluded that R is faster than S and that the main constrain to the speed of the programs is depending on how much garbage collection occurs for a certain task. Interesting, even though R seem to be fast the largest problem is associated with the design of it where everything must be storage internally and that functions cannot be save in a simple way.
I also really enjoyed how they talked about the future developments since this is something really notorious about R, that is continuously making improvements as technology and demands from users changes.