JD Long (at Cerebral Mastication) posted a question on Twitter about an artifact in ESS, where typing “” gets you “<-“. This is because in the early days of S+, “” was an allowed assignment operator, and ESS was developed in that era. Later, it was disallowed in favor of “<-” and “=”, so ESS was modified to map “_” to “<-“. Now I like the typing convenience of this map, and I don’t use underscores in my variable names, so I was fine.
R has some powerful tools for parallel processing, which I discovered while searching for ways to fully utilize my 8-core computer at work. What surprised me is how easy it is…about 6 lines of code, if that. Given that I wasn’t allowed to install heavy duty parallel-processing systems like MPICH on the computer, I found that the library SNOW fit the bill nicely through its use of sockets. I also discovered the libraries foreach and iterators, which were released to the community by the development team at Revolution R.
On a lark, and to kill a bit of time, I was running the R fortune command looking for references to SAS. Here’s what two successive random fortunes turned up. Can there be two more antipodal opinions about the same product? I laughed out loud.
fortune(‘SAS’) There are companies whose yearly license fees to SAS total millions of dollars. Then those companies hire armies of SAS programmers to program an archaic macro language using old statistical methods to produce ugly tables and the worst graphics in the statistical software world.
I seem to be doing more and more with Python for work over and above using it as a generic scripting language. R has been my workhorse for analysis for a long time (15+ years in various incarnations of S+ and R), but it still has some deficiencies. I’m finding Python easier and faster to work with for large data sets. I’m also a bit happier with Python’s graphical capabilities via matplotlib, which allows dynamic updating of graphs _a la _Matlab, another drawback that R has despite great graphical capabilities.