Since common-lisp-stat has been very quite the last years or so, I was very happy to find Gary Hollis’s CL data analysis library. Lisp still has a bright future ahead. #lisp

  Magnus Öström, Parachute.

Ease of learning vs relearning, by John Cook. Nice points, as always. I have just some minor concerns with the last paragraphs where the author says that the tidyverse is great beacuse of its consistency. First, pending some minor annoyances with the naming convention of formal arguments in base R functions–and recommended packages–, which I always called R’s language idiosyncrasies, I do not find base R that much inconsistent. Second, I disagree with the idea that the tidyverse comes with that much conceptual integrity, for what I used to see. Most importantly, there are so many dedicated functions in, e.g., dplyr, that it goes against the principle of compositionality that we use to like in functional and scripting languages. Finally, what used to be available in a short number of packages, but especially base, is now scattered throughout several packages (forcats, glue, etc.), so that I have a hard time believing that newcomers could find their way as easily as they would with base R only. Anyway, that’s my 2¢, and it is nowhere a critic of Hadley Wickham’s account to the R ecosystem. #rstats

Some interesting resources on Scheme by Philip Bewig, who you may know if you happen to spend some time on Programming Praxis. There are also nice Awk scripts lurking around on his site. #scheme

I love the design of Thomas Honeyman’s website. I yet have to find some more time to read (and grasp) his blog posts.

Nice resource: Functional programming in Clojure. #clojure

Functional and scripting languages are more concise than procedural and object- oriented languages; C is hard to beat when it comes to raw speed on large inputs, but performance differences over inputs of moderate size are less pronounced and allow even interpreted languages to be competitive; compiled strongly-typed languages, where more defects can be caught at compile time, are less prone to runtime failures than interpreted or weakly-typed languages. — A Comparative Study of Programming Languages in Rosetta Code

Basic Text Processing in Functional Style. #haskell

Lisp Flavoured Erlang, or the best of both worlds for s-expr-based distributed systems?

Should read: Inference of complex population histories using whole-genome sequences from multiple populations. #bioinformatics