Thread overview
Obama endorses D
Sep 04, 2010
Walter Bright
Sep 04, 2010
Jordi Sayol
Sep 04, 2010
dsimcha
Sep 05, 2010
some lurker
Sep 05, 2010
JMRyan
September 04, 2010
Obama: "You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in D.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/obamas-latest-joke-republicans.html
September 04, 2010
Al 04/09/10 21:16, En/na Walter Bright ha escrit:
> Obama: "You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in D.
>
> http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/obamas-latest-joke-republicans.html
>
>

:-)

-- 
Jordi Sayol
September 04, 2010
== Quote from Walter Bright (newshound2@digitalmars.com)'s article
> Obama: "You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in D. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/obamas-latest-joke-republicans.html

This one makes me laugh especially because there's actually an R programming language that I occasionally have to use, and I generally hate it.  It's basically a domain specific language for statistics and not well-known outside the statistics community.

The biggest problem with it is poor documentation of basic things like builtin data structures.  D's documentation looks great in comparison.  The other one is that it's too high-level, domain specific and slow (even compared to other interpreted languages) to be easy to think of as a "real" programming language. At the same time it's too low-level and lacking in simple (i.e. GUI or single command) ways to do simple things to be easy to think of as a plain old application.  Basically, you have to program to use it, but when you try, if you're used to "real" languages you feel like you're programming with 8 of your fingers crushed.
September 05, 2010
dsimcha Wrote:

> == Quote from Walter Bright (newshound2@digitalmars.com)'s article
> > Obama: "You want to go forward, what do you do? You put it in D. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/08/obamas-latest-joke-republicans.html
> 
> This one makes me laugh especially because there's actually an R programming language that I occasionally have to use, and I generally hate it.  It's basically a domain specific language for statistics and not well-known outside the statistics community.
> 
> The biggest problem with it is poor documentation of basic things like builtin data structures.  D's documentation looks great in comparison.  The other one is that it's too high-level, domain specific and slow (even compared to other interpreted languages) to be easy to think of as a "real" programming language. At the same time it's too low-level and lacking in simple (i.e. GUI or single command) ways to do simple things to be easy to think of as a plain old application.  Basically, you have to program to use it, but when you try, if you're used to "real" languages you feel like you're programming with 8 of your fingers crushed.

Sounds a lot like matlab.
September 05, 2010
dsimcha <dsimcha@yahoo.com> wrote in news:i5ue7v$1sp0$1@digitalmars.com:

> The biggest problem with it is poor documentation of basic things like builtin data structures.

R and S are approximately the same thing.  So checking the documentation for S may help.  Maybe you already knew that.

S-Plus may be faster and easier to deal with than R.  It's probably expensive.  If you are associated with a university, you can probably get a site license for under $200.

I've never dealt with either language, so I probably know less about all of this than you do.  But if you didn't, you may very well want to check into S-Plus.  Just be glad you don't have to deal with SAS.