Discussion
Loading...

Post

Log in
  • About
  • Code of conduct
  • Privacy
  • Users
  • Instances
  • About Bonfire
Oliver D. Reithmaier
Oliver D. Reithmaier
@odr_k4tana@infosec.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

Student of mine (CS) recently said she loves R because "you can tell the community is mostly non-CS. Everything is documented and explained so well".
#rstats #academicchatter

  • Copy link
  • Flag this post
  • Block
JohnMashey
JohnMashey
@JohnMashey@mstdn.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

@odr_k4tana
That of course makes sense if one understands the history of R and its ancestor S... created at Bell Labs long ago, led by John Chambers, in part motivated to help researchers who (usually) were not also CMPSC folks do statistics.
I.e., in that era, they were mostly doing stats in Fortran.
Here's oral history John did for us in 2022:
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792763/
That's discussed in transcript, starting ~page 7:
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102792762/,

Chambers, John oral history - 102792762 - CHM

John Chambers was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and attended the University of Toronto, studying Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. In 1960, as second-year undergraduate, he got introduced to both statistics and Fortran, but was warned that spending much time programming would inhibit a ca...

Chambers, John oral history - 102792763 - CHM

John Chambers was born and raised in Toronto, Canada and attended the University of Toronto, studying Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. In 1960, as second-year undergraduate, he got introduced to both statistics and Fortran, but was warned that spending much time programming would inhibit a ca...
  • Copy link
  • Flag this comment
  • Block

bonfire.cafe

A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate

bonfire.cafe: About · Code of conduct · Privacy · Users · Instances
Bonfire social · 1.0.2-alpha.7 no JS en
Automatic federation enabled
Log in
  • Explore
  • About
  • Members
  • Code of Conduct