R help - Jan 2019 - Newbie Question on R versus Matlab/Octave versus C

Hi,

I recently learned of the existence of R through a physicist friend who 
uses it in his research. I've used Octave for a decade, and C for 35 
years, but would like to learn R. These all have advantages and 
disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly know how 
to evaluate them. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

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On 1/29/19 10:05 AM, Alan Feuerbacher wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently learned of the existence of R through a physicist friend who 
> uses it in his research. I've used Octave for a decade, and C for 35 
> years, but would like to learn R. These all have advantages and 
> disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly know how 
> to evaluate them. Any suggestions?
* C is fast, but with a syntax that is (to my mind) virtually
   incomprehensible.  (You probably think differently about this.)

* In C, you essentially have to roll your own for all tasks; in R,
   practically anything (well ...) that you want to do has already
   been programmed up.  CRAN is a wonderful resource, and there's more
   on github.

* The syntax of R meshes beautifully with *my* thought patterns; YMMV.

* Why not just bog in and try R out?  It's free, it's readily available,
   and there are a number of good online tutorials.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276

R has many similarities to Octave.  Have a look at:

https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/R-and-octave.txt
https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=matconv

On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 4:58 PM Alan Feuerbacher <alanf00 at comcast.net>
wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I recently learned of the existence of R through a physicist friend who
> uses it in his research. I've used Octave for a decade, and C for 35
> years, but would like to learn R. These all have advantages and
> disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly know how
> to evaluate them. Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks!
>
> ---
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com

On 1/28/2019 4:20 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
> 
> On 1/29/19 10:05 AM, Alan Feuerbacher wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>
>> I recently learned of the existence of R through a physicist friend 
>> who uses it in his research. I've used Octave for a decade, and C
for
>> 35 years, but would like to learn R. These all have advantages and 
>> disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly know
how
>> to evaluate them. Any suggestions?
> 
> * C is fast, but with a syntax that is (to my mind) virtually
>  ? incomprehensible.? (You probably think differently about this.)
I've been doing it long enough that I have little problem with it, 
except for pointers. :-)
> * In C, you essentially have to roll your own for all tasks; in R,
>  ? practically anything (well ...) that you want to do has already
>  ? been programmed up.? CRAN is a wonderful resource, and there's more
>  ? on github.
 >
> * The syntax of R meshes beautifully with *my* thought patterns; YMMV.
> 
> * Why not just bog in and try R out?? It's free, it's readily
available,
>  ? and there are a number of good online tutorials.
I just installed R on my Linux Fedora system, so I'll do that.

I wonder if you'd care to comment on my little project that prompted 
this? As part of another project, I wanted to model population growth 
starting from a handful of starting individuals. This is exponential in 
the long run, of course, but I wanted to see how a few basic parameters 
affected the outcome. Using Octave, I modeled a single person as a 
"cell", which in Octave has a good deal of overhead. The program 
basically looped over the entire population, and updated each person 
according to the parameters, which included random statistical 
variations. So when the total population reached, say 10,000, and an 
update time of 1 day, the program had to execute 10,000 x 365 update 
operations for each year of growth. For large populations, say 100,000, 
the program did not return even after 24 hours of run time.

So I switched to C, and used its "struct" declaration and an array of 
structs to model the population. This allowed the program to complete in 
under a minute as opposed to 24 hours+. So in line with your comments, C 
is far more efficient than Octave.

How do you think R would fare in this simulation?

Alan


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Two additional comments:

- depending on the nature of your problem you may be able to get an
analytic solution using branching processes. I found this approach
successful when I once had to model stem cell growth.

- in addition to NetLogo another alternative to R would be the Julia
language which is motivated to some degree by Octave but is actually
quite different and is particularly suitable in terms of performance
for iterative computations where one iteration depends on the prior
one.

On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 6:32 PM Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> R has many similarities to Octave.  Have a look at:
>
> https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/R-and-octave.txt
> https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=matconv
>
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2019 at 4:58 PM Alan Feuerbacher <alanf00 at
comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I recently learned of the existence of R through a physicist friend
who
> > uses it in his research. I've used Octave for a decade, and C for
35
> > years, but would like to learn R. These all have advantages and
> > disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly know
how
> > to evaluate them. Any suggestions?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > ---
> > This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> > https://www.avast.com/antivirus
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> > PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>
>
> --
> Statistics & Software Consulting
> GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
> tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
> email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com


-- 
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP
email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com

On Mon, 28 Jan 2019 at 22:58, Alan Feuerbacher <alanf00 at comcast.net>
wrote:

[...]
> These all have advantages and
> disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly know how
> to evaluate them. Any suggestions?
If you have one-hour left, you
can download  pdf file (8 pages total)
"Getting started in R"
from http://ilustat.com/shared/Getting-Started-in-R.pdf

And then try running the code used in the examples.

Regards
Martin

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On 1/30/2019 7:44 AM, Martin M?ller Skarbiniks Pedersen
wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jan 2019 at 22:58, Alan Feuerbacher <alanf00 at comcast.net 
> <mailto:alanf00 at comcast.net>> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>  > These all have advantages and
>  > disadvantages for certain tasks, but as I'm new to R I hardly
know how
>  > to evaluate them. Any suggestions?
> 
> If you have one-hour left, you
> can download? pdf file (8 pages total)
> "Getting started in R"
> from http://ilustat.com/shared/Getting-Started-in-R.pdf
> 
> And then try running the code used in the examples.
Downloaded and in my pipeline.

Thanks!

Alan

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