In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Loren M. McCarter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal) writes:
>> The truth: S-Plus is not particularly powerful, and it's not
>> particularly well designed. Its implementation by the people at AT&T
>> Bell labs is downright incompetent. Of course, it has lots of support
>> for statistical methods, making it useful for statisticians to know,
>> but it's a shame that this has had the effect of locking academic
>> statisticians into this indifferently-designed and badly-implemented
>> language, which is completely unusable some purposes, such as Markov
>> chain Monte Carlo computations. The free "R" look-alike for S may fix
>> at least the badly-implemented part of this dilema.
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jan de Leeuw) writes:
>> Hear, hear ! S-plus could have been a Microsoft product. It's
>> bloated and slow and it's everywhere.
>I don't want to start a statistical-computing religious war, but I'm
>curious about alternative suggestions to S-Plus and R. Is there
>another language that the anti-S-plus-crowd would recommend over
>S-Plus for graphical data exploration (e.g., python, xlisp-stat, ibm's
>data visualization tool, yorick). I've read the criticisms of S-plus,
>but I don't see many alternative suggestions. Personnally, I use R,SAS
>and occasionally Python for statistical analyses and data
>exploration. For data management, I use a combination of SQL,SAS,UNIX
>scripts, and Python. I find R and S-Plus to be VERY USEFUL for
>graphical data exploration. But, I'm not married to one language over
>another and would welcome alternative suggestions as I'm sure would
>the student who posed the initial question.
We will not get a good product until we have people who
understand theoretical statistics, numerical analysis
at a mathematical level, and data structures getting
together to produce something which is simple, fast,
and flexible. There has been too much of a rush to
produce weak products designed for the religious use
of procedures by those who do not understand what is
going on.
Frankly, I think we would do better NOW with libraries
which could be combined with computer languages which
allow the user to make real use of computer facilities,
which go beyond the common languages. This is especially
the case in producing good uniform "random" numbers and
using them to generate other types. To give an example
which will be difficult in most, a method much closer
to computational simplicity for generating random variables
with density 6x(1-x) in the unit interval would be to take
m to be half the distance to the next 1 in a random bit
stream rounded up, and n the distance from there to the
next 1, and replace the m+n-th bit in a uniform (0,1)
random variable by the complement of the m-th bit. All
of this is difficult at present.
--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
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