Well put, Gabor!
P.S. Sorry for wasting the bandwidth. Just couldn't resist, so much true
it is.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Gabor
> Grothendieck
> Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 8:06 AM
> To: Andy Bunn
> Cc: R-Help
> Subject: Re: [R] congratulations to the JGR developers
>
> 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.
>
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