Re: Emacs history, and "Is Emacs difficult to learn?"

[Phillip Lord]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:
>
>>> What is R?
>>
>> A programming language designed for doing stats. It's a really,
>> really bizarre language which messes your head up, but is
>> perfect for stats.
>>
>> And, yes, there is an emacs package for it. Very good too!
>>
>> http://ess.r-project.org/
>
> Cool! I like stats, like all boys, I was about to say. Probably
> MATLAB draw some inspiration from R, in that case. And possibly
> even from FORTRAN, the legacy "number crunching language" number
> one. (Or so they say.)


R was originally inspired by S which was a commercial equivalent. But
there are now many. many libraries for R. including things like
bioconductor which is great if you handling biological data.

R by itself doesn't come with an integrated GUI like matlab, although
you can use R studio which is nice (or Emacs which is my poison). It's
main advantage over matlab is you don't have to spend time fighting with
the license server which can be a tremendous pain.

Phil