[Haskell-cafe] data analysis question

[Jeffrey Brown]

My experience with R is that, while worlds more powerful than the dominant
commercial alternatives (Stata, SAS, it was unintuitive relative to other
general-purpose languages like Python. I wonder/speculate whether it was
distorted by the pull of its statistical applications away from what would
be more natural.

On Wed, Nov 12, 2014 at 6:22 PM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:

> On 12/11/14 09:21, Peter Simons wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Ah, great then.
>
> My impression was formed after listening to this FLOSS weekly episode:
> http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/306 (starting from 33:55).
>
> >  > 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.
>
> That doesn't match my experience. Maybe it's just me and my
> unwillingness and write C-like code that traverses arrays by indexes (I
> know most scientists don't have a problem with that), but I found it
> hard to express data transformations and queries functionally in R.
>
> >  > 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?
>
> This was a while ago, and I don't remember what solution I picked up
> eventually. Of course I could just write a for-loop to populate an
> array, but I hadn't found anything that matches the simplicity and
> clarity of the line above. How would you write it in R?
>
> Roman
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