Compiler writers are always frustrated that the cpu they are currently targeting does not contain the one instruction that would enable them to generate really efficient code. If only it were possible to add new instructions to the cpu. Well, it looks like this will soon be possible; Intel have ... [Read more...]

In January the material in my book on Empirical software engineering using R had its first exposure to professional software developers at a one day workshop (there was a rerun last week; slides here). The sessions were both fully booked, but as often happens on half turned up, around 15 at ... [Read more...]

The comments on my post outlining recommended R usage for professional developers were universally scornful, with my proposal recommending subset receiving the greatest wrath. The main argument against using subset appeared to be that it went against existing practice, one comment linked to Hadley Wickham suggesting it was useful in ... [Read more...]

R is not one of those languages where there is only one way of doing something, the language is blessed/cursed with lots of ways of doing the same thing. Teaching R to professional developers is easy in the sense that their fluency with other languages will enable them to ... [Read more...]

With the creation of the R consortium R has moved up a rung on the ladder of commercial importance. R has captured the early adopters and has picked up a fair few of the early majority (I’m following the technology adoption life-cycle model made popular by the book Crossing ... [Read more...]

I was at the Microsoft Gaming data hackathon today. Gaming is very big business and companies rarely publish detailed game data. Through contacts one of the organizers was able to obtain two gaming datasets, both containing just under 300M of compressed of data. Illyriad supplied a random snapshot of anonymised ... [Read more...]

Casual users of a system want to learn a few simple rules that enable them to get most things done. Many languages have a design principle of only providing one way of doing things. Members of one language family are known for providing umpteen different ways of doing something and ... [Read more...]

The paper Analysis of the Linux Kernel Evolution Using Code Clone Coverage analysed 136 versions of Linux (from 1.0 to 2.6.18.3) and calculated the amount of source code that was shared, going forward, between each pair of these versions. When I saw the heatmap at the end of the paper (see below) I ... [Read more...]

X and Y are for XSLT, yacc and Yorick. XSLT is the tree climbing Kangaroo of the programming language world. Eating your own dog food is good practice for implementors, but users should not be forced to endure it. Anyway, people only use XML, rather than JSON, to increase the ... [Read more...]

R is for Ratfor, R, RUNOFF, RPG and Ruby Ratfor is a structured form of Fortran from the days when structured programming was the in-thing and Fortran did not have much of it (lots got added in later revisions). I think its success came from allowing users to claim a ... [Read more...]

I see that Hadley Wickham’s new book, “Advanced R”, is being published in dead tree form and will be available a month or so. Hadley has generously made the material available online; I quickly skimmed the material a few months ago when I first heard about it and had ... [Read more...]

I joined the Geekli.st climate Hackathon this weekend at the Hub Westminster (my favorite venue for Hackathons). While the organizers had lots of enthusiasm they had very little in the way of data for us to work on. No problem, ever since the Flood-relief hackathon I have wanted to ... [Read more...]

IST/5, the British Standards’ committee responsible for programming languages in the UK, has a new(ish) committee secretary and like all people in a new role wants to see a vision of the future; IST/5 members have been emailed asking us what we see happening in the programming language standards’ ... [Read more...]

I recently saw a post about something called ValidR and as somebody with a long standing professional interest in language validation immediately read the article and referenced links. I was disappointed to find that what was being validated was the installation, not the behavior of the implementation. In the context ... [Read more...]

My sole prediction for 2014 has come true, Facebook have announced the Hack language (if you don’t know that HHVM is the Hip Hop Virtual Machine you are obviously not a trendy developer). This language does not follow the usual trend in that it looks useful, rather than being fashion ... [Read more...]

I was surprised to find recently that there are now over 15,000 lines of R code in the book I am working on. If I had written that much code in another ‘newly’ acquired language I would probably feel a lot more knowledgeable about it than I currently feel about R. ... [Read more...]

In most languages return is a statement, but in R it is a function (in fact R does not really have statements, it only has expressions). This function-like behavior of return is useful for figuring out the order in which operations are performed, e.g., the value returned by return(1)+... [Read more...]

Looking at a graph displayed as part of a pdf document is so tantalizing; I want that data as a csv! One way to get the data is to email the author(s) and ask for it. I do this regularly and sometimes get the apologetic reply that the data ... [Read more...]

Most books that discuss regression modeling start out and often finish with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) as the technique to use; Generalized Least Squares (GLS) sometimes get a mention near the back. This is all well and good if the readers’ data has the characteristics required for OLS to be ... [Read more...]

I was in Dillons, the one opposite University College London, at the start of the week and what did I spy there? There is now a bookshelf devoted to R (right, second from top) in the programming languages section. The shelf would be a lot fuller if O’Reilly did ... [Read more...]