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0 pointsj-pb4y ago0 comments

SQL made relational programming possible, when computer were too slow to do declarative programming. The modern aproach would be something more highlevel/declarative like Datalog, but given the context SQL made a good tradeoff in terms of programmer control and declarativity.

R is ugly because it encourages users to use it wrong. For loops are slow as a snail, but are what everybody uses and teaches, while the proper/fast way to wrangle data, with higher order functions like map, is hidden behind idiosyncratic names and obscure APIs.

Even the creator of R considered making it a language instead of the scheme library that it started iut as, as a mistake.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

Someone4y ago· 2 in thread

I think something like QBE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_Example; about as old as SQL) is the way to let non-programmers write queries.

marianoguerra4y ago

I'm working on that :)

Instadeq: A Live Programming Environment for End User Data Analysis and Visualization

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEkYqnGICE Slides: https://marianoguerra.github.io/presentations/2021-live/

Nekorosu4y ago

Looks a lot like declarative logical programming language in disguise (Datalog, Prolog).

jhbadger4y ago

I was a huge fan of xlispstat in the 1990s (which I've archived on Github at (https://github.com/jhbadger/xlispstat), but the simple fact is that the majority of the statistics community just didn't like Lisp-like languages, and not only xlispstat, but newer projects like Incanter (statistics for Clojure) have pretty much failed as well. R meets its need far better than a Scheme library that nobody would have used. It's yet another example of "worse is better".

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