Hadley Wickham gave an excelent presentation earlier this month at Google Tech. I found this talk on http://www.r-statistics.com/2011/06/engineering-data-analysis-with-r-and-ggplot2-a-google-tech-talk-given-by-hadley-wickham/ He focused on domain specific languages and the use of R as the programming language in data analysis.
Transform
subset
mutate
arrange
summarize
*
by operator (ddply)
+
join
match_df
He also gave an excelent example for a real data set including the R code.
His conclusions:
A programming language gives you: reproducibility, automation, communication, but has a learning curve
R gives you: freedom, a community, connectivity, building blocks, but the community can be prickly and it is slow (relative to other languages).
Thoughtful DSLs should make it easir to solve common data analysis problems.
Great summary, thanks for writing it (you could also embed the youtube in your post
)
Cheers,
Tal
Tal, What a privilege to receive your comment! I’m embarrassed now that I didn’t put more thought into this post. My blog is still very young but I’m excited to start contributing to the community ideas and resources for using R in data analysis especially as it pertains to finance and quantitative trading. You have an excellent blog that I recommend to all my readers. Thanks, Alton.