On 26 January 2011 at 10:28, Andrew Piskorski wrote: | On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:17:45AM -0500, Dominick Samperi wrote: | Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Finance] R to common lisp translator | | > The paper by Ross Ihaka and Duncan Temple Lang titled "Back to the | > Future: Lisp as a Base for a Statistical Computing System" discusses | > building a new foundation for R on top of Common Lisp, but I don't know | > if any work is being done in this direction. | | Btw, when I read that paper a few years ago, it was interesting, but | it also sounded a lot like its authors largely picked their solution | (Lisp) first, and then thought about how to justify it. Lisp probably | WOULD be a pretty good base for building a next-generation R-like | tool, but their discussion of possible alternatives seemed quite | cursory, as did their "Backward's compatibility?" section. | | http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3726 | | If I had both the time (a lot of time!) and a real mandate to do R&D | on something like that, I'd also look into LuaJIT, Erlang, and SciDB, | and think hard about what R problems I really want to solve and what I | could learn about solving them from those other tools. However, | despite these criticisms, I do hope that Ihaka and Lang proceed | further with their ideas, and look forward to reading more about it. | | Of course, this is all pretty much off topic... | | For the original poster who sparked this thread: Trying to speed up | your R code by auto-translating it to Lisp is a crazy, totally | impractical idea. You are confusing someone's brief dead-end R&D | exploration with something you could actually use for real. Profile | your R code and figure out what is really slowing it down, then | proceed from there. There isn't any magic Lisp bullet to solve things | for you.
Well put. I don't often feel the need for an old-fashioned AOL-style 'me too' but this is one of those cases. R gives you more analytical fire power than any other tool we know, and it also gives you well-tested means to accelerate your code. I gave a few tutorials on introducing HPC with R that illustrate a some of those means. Reimplementing in another language nobody on the street uses is not one of them. Dirk | -- | Andrew Piskorski <[email protected]> | http://www.piskorski.com/ | | _______________________________________________ | [email protected] mailing list | https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-finance | -- Subscriber-posting only. If you want to post, subscribe first. | -- Also note that this is not the r-help list where general R questions should go. -- Dirk Eddelbuettel | [email protected] | http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-finance -- Subscriber-posting only. If you want to post, subscribe first. -- Also note that this is not the r-help list where general R questions should go.
