[Haskell-cafe] data analysis question

[Peter Simons]

Hi Roman,

 > With Haskell you don't have to load the whole data set into memory,
 > as Michael shows. With R, on the other hand, you do.

Can you please point me to a reference to back that claim up?

I'll offer [1] and [2] as a pretty good indications that you may not be
entirely right about this.


 > Besides, if you're not an R expert, and if the analysis you want to do
 > is not readily available, it may be quite a pain to implement in R.

Actually, implementing sophisticated queries in R is quite easy because
the language was specifically designed for that kind of thing. If you
have no experience in neither R nor Haskell, then learning R is *far*
easier than learning Haskell is because it doesn't aim to be a powerful
general-purpose programming language. It aims to be a powerful language
for data analysis.

Now, one *could* write a DSL in Haskell, of course, that matches R
features and accomplishes data analysis tasks in a similarly convenient
syntax, etc. But unfortunately no such library exists, and writing one
is not trivial task.


 > I still don't know an acceptable way to write something like zipWith
 > f (tail vec) vec in R.

Why would that be any trouble? What kind of solutions did you find and
in what way were they unacceptable?

Best regards,
Peter


[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ff/index.html
[2] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bigmemory/index.html