[Haskell-beginners] Need advice on R vs Haskell

[Allen S. Rout]

On 11/20/2011 12:57 AM, haskell heath wrote:
> [ I've dabbled in lots of stuff, which language should I use for what?]

and

>     I'm new to Haskell and I can't really call myself a decent
>     programmer in any other language. Do you think it's wrong to think
>     that I can contribute to the statistics library?


I'm a journeyman R coder and a bare novice at Haskell.  What springs to 
my mind here is, what's your primary goal:  to enhance the statistical 
toolset available in Haskell, or to accomplish a task?

If the former, then I think the critical question isn't your language 
competence but your statistical props;  if you watch the R devel list 
for any duration, you'll see how deeply the real stats folks treat these 
problems;  to have a broken tool (and not know it) is often worse than 
to have no tool.  If you've got the stats clue, then by all means 
soldier on. Subject Matter Experts rock. :)

If your goal is to accomplish your task, then I suggest that R is 
absolutely the superior environment for statistical thinking these days. 
  Cobble together whatever data-collection bits you need in whatever 
toolset is convenient, and if you're scraping web, then node.js is as 
good a place to start as any.   Drop CSV files from your scraping, and 
go to town in R.

- Allen S. Rout