Which D features to emphasize for academic review article

[TJB]

On Sunday, 12 August 2012 at 17:22:21 UTC, dsimcha wrote:

> ...  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 exactly how I feel, and why I am turning to D. My data 
sets are huge (64 TB for just a few years of data) and my 
econometric methods computationally intensive and the limitations 
of Matlab and R are always almost instantly constraining.

> 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 ...

Very well put - it expresses my feeling precisely.  And C++ is 
such a complicated beast that I feel caught in between.  I'd been 
dreaming of a language that offers modeling power as well as 
efficiency.

> ...  Do most serious programmers who work in problem domains 
> relevant to Matlab and R feel this way or is it just me?.

I certainly feel the same. I only use them when I have to or for 
very simple prototyping.

> 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.

Thanks for your work on these packages! I will for sure be 
including them in my write up. I think they offer great 
possibilities for econometrics in D.

TJB