Which D features to emphasize for academic review article

dsimcha dsimcha at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 12 10:22:20 PDT 2012


On Sunday, 12 August 2012 at 03:30:24 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>
>> - The language's superior modeling power and level of control 
>> comes at an increase in complexity compared to languages such 
>> as e.g. Python. So the statistician would need a larger 
>> upfront investment in order to reap the associated benefits.
>
> Statistician often use the R language 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_language ).
> Python contains much more "computer science" and CS complexity 
> compared to R. Not just advanced stuff like coroutines, 
> metaclasses, decorators, Abstract Base Classes, operator 
> overloading, and so on, but even simpler things, like 
> generators, standard library collections like heaps and deques, 
> and so on.
> For some statisticians I've seen, even several parts of Python 
> are too much hard to use or understand. I have rewritten 
> several of their Python scripts.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile


For people with more advanced CS/programming knowledge, though, 
this is an advantage of D.  I find Matlab and R incredibly 
frustrating to use for anything but very standard 
matrix/statistics computations on data that's already structured 
the way I like it.  This is mostly because the standard CS 
concepts you mention are at best awkward and at worst impossible 
to express and, being aware of them, I naturally want to take 
advantage of them.

Using Matlab or R feels like being forced to program with half 
the tools in my toolbox either missing or awkwardly misshapen, so 
I avoid it whenever practical.  (Actually, languages like C and 
Java that don't have much modeling power feel the same way to me 
now that I've primarily used D and to a lesser extent Python for 
the past few years.  Ironically, these are the languages that are 
easy to integrate with R and Matlab respectively.  Do most 
serious programmers who work in problem domains relevant to 
Matlab and R feel this way or is it just me?).  This was my 
motivation for writing Dstats and mentoring Cristi's fork of 
SciD.  D's modeling power is so outstanding that I was able to 
replace R and Matlab for a lot of use cases with plain old 
libraries written in D.


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