On 12/08/12 18:22, dsimcha wrote:
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.
The main use-case and advantage of both R and MATLAB/Octave seems to me to be the plotting functionality -- I've seen some exceptionally beautiful stuff done with R in particular, although I've not personally explored its capabilities too far.
The annoyance of R in particular is the impenetrable thicket of dependencies that can arise among contributed packages; it feels very much like some are thrown over the wall and then built on without much concern for organization. :-(