[R] R: Tools for thinking about data analysis and graphics

[Hadley Wickham]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Michael Friendly <friendly at yorku.ca> wrote:
>  I'm giving a talk about some aspects of language and conceptual tools for
> thinking about how
> to solve problems in several programming languages for statistical computing
> and graphics. I'm particularly
> interested in language features that relate to:
>
> o expressive power: ease of translating what you want to do into the results
> you want
> o elegance: how well does the code provide a simple human-readable
> description of what is done?
> o extensibility: ease of generalizing a method to wider scope
> o learnability: your learning curve (rate, asymptote)
>
> For R, some things to cite are (a) data and function objects, (b)
> object-oriented methods (S3 & S4); (c) function mapping over data with
> *apply methods and plyr.
>
> What other language features of R should be on this list?  I would welcome
> suggestions (and brief illustrative examples).

 * missing values
 * subsetting
 * lexical scope and closures (goes along with first class functions)
 * built-in documentation
 * CRAN (not exactly a language feature, but important part of ecosystem)
 * thoughtful interactive features - e.g. a <- 10 doesn't print 10.


Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/