R and JS: distant cousins with a shared heritage and tangled future

[project-delphi]

Apologies, my Spanish is reasonable, but not up to technical/scientific level, so I propose this talk in English.

Summary

R and ES (EcmaScript) are related via underlying ideas that are from LISP. The two users communities have limited overlap. However that will be changing in the coming years. I’ve been experimenting with ES.

Outline

R inherits from S, which was created at Bell Labs, and is used mostly by people with significant statistical exposure (Numerical Linear Algebra, Optimization, Probability, Simulation) but little formal training in modern software development techniques. It is heavily influenced by LISP flavors of the 70s. The language is aging and has limited support for GPUs, multi-threading or cluster computing.

ES history you know, along with Brendan Eich having many ideas from Scheme - a more recent version of LISP.

Both share functional programming concepts such as closures, composition, lexical scoping, generic functions or prototype based inheritance, and 2 class systems. There is no R to JS interpreter due to the highly optimized and specific nature of base R definition.

R is being replaced by python and frameworks with bindings to python from ML and Statistics at this time.

The future however is likely to be a flavor/framework of ES with bindings to battle tested numerical libraries. This is due to the rapid improvements in ES and it being the default platform for almost all future applications.

One example is TensorflowJS.

Suggested Date: End of Feb

name: Ravi Kalia
url: https://twitter.com/ravkalia1
pic: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1076231361357176833/q2vwsgXN_400x400.jpg
bio: "ML Engineer con poco Espanol"

[jmz7v]

Hi @project-delphi !

We've been slowly getting back on track with our talks! Are you still located in Mexico City and interested in talking about this?

[project-delphi]

Sadly away until Xmas.

[jmz7v]

Will keep you on the watch for that, thank you!