[R] What makes R different from other programming languages?

[Alexandre Aguiar]

Hi.

Em Ter 21 Ago 2012, Mark Dalphin escreveu:
> I guess the other aspect which I take the most time to describe to any
> programmer from other more traditional languages is the working with
> vectors. To use R effectively, you must move data in large chunks; the
> standard paradigm of looping over the data is the fastest way to write
> a slow program.

That's what makes R kind of hybrid: both procedural and declarative. 
Declaring objects and its predicates and have all fully and efficiently 
processed without programming every single step may be shocking for those 
who only know the 'procedural way'. Except for the experience with SQL 
with which we do not write 'SQL programs', most programmers (including 
amateur programmers) never had contact with the declarative programming 
paradigm. Many may have never heard of Prolog, for instance.

Cheers.


-- 


Alexandre

--
Alexandre Santos Aguiar, MD, SCT

gpg public key: mailto:gpgkey at asaguiar.net
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