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Comment by insulanian | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain in few sentences (or point me to the place where I can get the answer) what is the benefit of using R over some functional language like Haskel, OCaml or F#?

Which use-cases does R shine in over those languages?

Is the popularity driven by R the language or its libraries?

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Libraries. If you want to do statistics in any other language, you have to reimplement 80% of the diagnostics and tests by hand and a good portion of methods and algorithms (no, not just esoteric ones).

While obviously the answer is libraries and data types (DataFrame is a very powerful semantic, replicated later in Python, Julia, Scala/Spark), R definitely IS a functional language:

- closures, lambdas

- high-order functions

- a lot R processing is map/fold-like (even though it's lapply instead of map)

There's also the `Map`, `Filter`, and `Reduce` functions provided by the base library, i.e. in addition to the `*apply` family of functions.

I took a course recently in ML that focused on Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Neural Nets. The professor chose R because of the libraries.

SVM's, Decision Trees, and Neural Nets are non-trivial to write libraries for. In order to produce similar libraries for any other language, you need either a good grounding in math (linear algebra, PDE's, and projective geometry at the least) or a well-developed ability to translate from one language - R source for instance - to the language of your choice without understanding completely what you're translating. Regardless of your background, it will take a significant amount of time and focus to accomplish it.

Our professor mentioned that Python may have libraries available now. He likes Python in general. In his research, he uses R simply due to familiarity.

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