Re: Status?

John, Frederic, et al.,

Thanks for the notes (and for Jan's off-list comments that
http://www.xlispstat.org/ should and will be online).  

John Fox wrote:

> I've spoken over the past couple of months to several individuals who, like
> myself, have more or less left Lisp-stat for R. There are several obvious
> reasons for doing so: Lisp-stat seems moribund, while R is alive and well;
> there is a very wide and growing range of statistical applications
> available for R; R has standards for data sets, models, documentation,
> etc.; and (perhaps more controversially) the S programming language is
> easier to use than Lisp.

Yep, you hit the controversial. :-)  Of course, I should wait until I
look at R, but I managed software engineers using S years ago, and I
don't recall being overly impressed with its ease of programming.

I'm ambivalent about moribund vs. alive and well; I don't need a
constant influx of new, glitzy features (to learn :-) for a tool to be
useful if it's solving my current needs, but I would welcome a growing
range of applications and standards and more ease at getting data into
and out of the system. 

I like functional languages, and LISP seems to be a powerful language
that has served people well over the years.  I've been off using J a bit
in the recent past.  It's a great language, too, but you have to roll a
bit of your own statistical code (and it's no XLISP-STAT) (although
rolling code in J may only take a line or three).  I think I decided to
come back to check out XLISP-STAT because it has more of a focus on the
statistical analysis side, and that's more of what I'm doing in an
exploratory sense.  
 
> Nevertheless, everyone to whom I've talked regrets losing some of the
> functionality of Lisp-stat, including the ability to draw dynamic, linked
> graphs, and the built-in facilities for constructing graphical interfaces.
> 
> Although I don't have the technical expertise either to answer the
> following question or, certainly, to implement a solution, I wonder whether
> it would be possible to incorporate the Lisp-stat graphics and GUI-building
> capabilities into R, ideally in the form of an add-on package that would
> work in all three supported environments -- Windows, Mac, and Linux/Unix. I
> know that there would be some obstacles -- and probably the components from
> Lisp-stat would have to run as a separate process -- but don't know whether
> these obstacles can be overcome.

In thinking about these wants, I'm curious if R or LISP is the better
platform.  Is R a functional language?  Does it have object-oriented
capability?  Is it array oriented (a la J)?

And for the practical, immediate question: I'm curious if learning R or
staying with XLISP-STAT is better for me.  I sense I have a bit of
research to do.  (I'll check Google later, but anyone have any good
starting links?)   

Regards,

Bill
-- 
Bill Harris                                  3217 102nd Place SE
Facilitated Systems                          Everett, WA 98208 USA
http://facilitatedsystems.com/               phone: +1 425 337-5541