[R] F# vs. R

[Steve Lianoglou]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 4:44 AM, Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
> I'd like to hear answers to this as well.
> A language doesn't have to be a complete
> replacement to be useful.

Totally agree.

> F# seems to have some nice features.

My intention isn't to have this explode into a language war, so
apologies in advance for any collateral damage but Scala is similar in
flavor to F# and runs on the JVM, which gives it bonus points in my
mind since the JVM is open source and runs on pretty much all major
platforms.

Also Scala recently added some support for increased speed over
primitive arrays (in the upcoming v2.8) via the @specialized
annotation:
http://twitter.com/alexcruise/status/1879654400 (has a link through to PDF)

Also, the scalala library is likely something people around these
parts would be interested in:
http://code.google.com/p/scalala/wiki/QuickStart

(it's currently going through a reboot to better fit w/ scala 2.8)

There are other (similar) packages in pure java that can drop down to
using native blas/lapack libraries installed in the system (like MTJ:
http://code.google.com/p/matrix-toolkits-java/) and one could imagine
wrapping them in more idiomatic scala to make them more
friendly/succinct.

Lastly, if people are looking for another rabbit hole to explore, you
could check out Incanter (written in Clojure) for reasons that should
become immediately obvious after visiting its site:
http://incanter.org/

Sorry for the diversion. Couldn't resist :-)

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact