[R] Fwd: Re: [friday topic]: what exactly is statistical com

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 3/2/07, Ted Harding <ted.harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk> wrote:

> I think the first developments which could be recognised as
> "statistical cmputing" (as opposed to using computers to do
> statistics) were the pioneering GENSTAT and GLIM (1973-4,
> though developed over some years previously). Possibly
> what characterised them for this was the fact that their
> programming language was recognisably statistical in flavour,
> and the commands triggered computational procedures in which
> statistical algorithms were implemented.

There were also many people using APL for statistical computing
in that time frame.

>
> Then, as the science of computer programming developed, and
> became more generalised, with "structures", "methods" and
> all the rest, so these concepts were implemented for statistics.
> The result of a computation was a data-structure, which could
> be recognised by any method that was capable of dealing with
>
> It's perhaps hard to say when S was actually born: perhaps
> passage to the outside world began with its port to UNIX
> in 1979, though it was conceived around 1975. But it must
> be acknowledged that in its adaptation of advanced (for the
> time) programming methods to statistics was a breakthrough
> in statistical computing.
>
> A quite early simple instance of this kind of programming
> was SPIDA (Statistical Program for Interactive Data Analysis)
> which was developed prior to 1988 -- since Dan Lunn & Don McNeil
> issued a SPIDA User's Manual in 1988 (and perhaps grew out of
> NcNeil's approaches described in his 1977 book "Interactive
> Data Analysis: A Practical Primer"), followed by the book
>
>  Computer-Interactive Data Aanalysis
>  A.D. Lunn and D.R. McNeil (Wiley 1991)
>  (with a couple of 5.25" DOS floppies with the SPIDA software)

McNeil's earlier book used APL.

Around the same time frame, i.e. late seventies, David Donoho at
Princeton

  http://www.ims.nus.edu.sg/imprints/interviews/DavidDonoho.pdf

developed ISP possibly along with Peter Bloomfield.  I think this
pre-dated S but was somewhat S-like in that it:
- was written in C using yacc
- ran on UNIX
- was interactive and had builtin regression and other stat routines
- eventually made its way to hundreds of universities (though it was
ultimately displaced by S)

>
> which I remember using with pleasure!
>
> So I see this confluence of the evolution of computational
> concepts and techniques through the 1970's and 80's, with
> the development of statistical modelling techniques and
> their implementation in software, as the core of "statistical
> computing".

A few other points.  There was an ASA section on statistical
computing in the 70's:

http://www.statcomputing.org/officers/1970s.html

and getting back to the subject heading of this thread, one of the Chairs
wrote a book called Statistical Computing published in 1980 (which I
own):

http://www.amazon.ca/Statistical-Computing-William-J-Kennedy/dp/0824768981