Paper on the "Design" of the R Language (Nerd Alert)

[Bryan Hanson]

Hi Folks... This paper has been getting a lot of attention on the
list servers and blogs in the past 24 hrs. It discusses the "design"
of the R language. I put "design" in quotes because one of the
conclusions seems to be that it is not really well-designed from a
computer science perspective. Or at least, it's quite quirky
theoretically, but the quirks are what seem to make it work so well
from the user's perspective. Some sections of the paper are way out
of my league, but the first few sections have some great quotes about
the nature of R. If you know other programming languages you'll
probably appreciate what they are saying, and if not, you'll begin to
get a sense of what advantages (quirks) R brings.

You can get the paper here: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/jv/pubs/ecoop12.pdf

Bryan

[Chester Fornari]

Hi Bryan - I rather like R's design... it makes 'sense' to me, but that's probably because I'm not a computer programmer, or at least not like the programmers that I know (my brother-in-law for instance). I noticed that the paper had a section on Bioconductor too...

thanks for passing this along to us,

chet

--
Professor Chet S Fornari
Biology Department & Biochemistry Program
DePauw University
765-658-4781
cfor...@depauw.edu