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
