[R] More user-friendly error message needed.

[Shin, Daehyok]

Hi, Bob.
As I said, I just begin to learn R, so I am not in a proper position to
compare the languages.
But, two things of R immediately captured my attention.

Pro. A lot of standard libraries including a powerful visualization, like
MATLAB.
As a scientific programmer, I really missed this kind of standard
GPL-licensed environment
for powerful array processing. You can use Numeric or numarray libraries to
use Python
for scientific computing, but most functions in other libraries don't assume
they can have vectors as arguments.

Con. Poor design for object-oriented programming, compared with Python.
I am quite sure that in the aspect of language design Python is far better
than MATLAB and R.
Simple, elegant, and powerful.
S3 supports only a basic level of OOP, while S4 introduced too complex
mechanisms for it.

Personally, I believe community and libraries are more important than
language itself.
So, even though I was a little disappointed at OOP of R, I will continue to
look at R.
Cheers.

Daehyok Shin (Peter)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch]On Behalf Of Bob Cain
> Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2004 PM 4:32
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] More user-friendly error message needed.
>
>
>
>
> Shin wrote:
>
> > Thanks for your kind explanation.
> > Actually, I just begin to learn R, so not familiar with many behaviors
> > of R yet. As a user of Python and MATLAB, I understand the problem of
> > cryptic error messages of loosely-typed languages.
>
> Besides that, what do you think of R so far?
>
>
> Bob
> --
>
> "Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
> simpler."
>
>                                               A. Einstein
>
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