[R] congratulations to the JGR developers

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 5/2/05, Andy Bunn <abunn at whrc.org> wrote:
> > Just want to offer my congratulations to the JGR developers as
> > the recepient
> > of the 2005 Chambers Award.  Great job, guys!!
> > http://stats.math.uni-augsburg.de/JGR/
> 
> This feels like the future of R to me. It's simple, powerful, and elegant
> just like R. As soon as the binary that works with 2.1 is released I'll use
> it exclusively on Linux and Windows. I'm deeply impressed.

I have not tried JGR but regarding your three adjective describing R,
R is very powerful but I am not sure I would characterize it as simple
and elegant -- complex and practical seem nearer to the mark to me.
Some parts of R may be simple and elegant but when I think of simple
and elegant languages I think of ones that are organized around a
single concept like APL (arrays), Smalltalk (objects), etc.   The underlying
Lisp roots of R may have a certain simplicity to them and S3 (though not
S4) is relatively simple but not R as a whole.  On the other hand, the
fact that it is practical, powerful and free with a broad set of builtin
and addon functionality and has become a de facto standard for statistical 
research have been sufficient reason for me to do all my computing using R.