# Re: ed borasky and his second favourite programming language **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [July 4, 2006, 8:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ed-borasky-and-his-second-favourite-programming-language/97086 "2006-07-04T20:50:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2006, 8:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ed-borasky-and-his-second-favourite-programming-language/97086/1 "2006-07-04T20:50:49Z")
Dear Matthew, you are running into open doors there - I did not write my last email to criticize anybody, but to ask why Ed Borasky likes to use R - that’s what the link Ara posted was promising to tell me - and I have no answer for that yet. That question is of course different from the question, “Why does Matthew S. like to use R?”, “Why do I use R?” Your statement > I can’t speak for Ed, but for me (I use it as well), it does > precisely what it needs to do, and it does it succinctly and well. > Which, not coincidentally, are the same reasons I use Ruby for the > things I use Ruby for, and the same reasons I use Prolog for the > things I use Prolog for. does not tell me what ordering of preference you would give to R, Ruby, or Prolog in any application nor for what reason. That sentence is just no more informative than saying, “I use language X”. That obviously means that you’ll have a reason for that - it could be “it’s the easiest/ the most convenient tool for doing task …, because …/I know of no other language (to do this task properly)/I’ve used that language for so-and-so many years and I’m too old to change now/it can output ‘hello world’ faster than language Y”, but you’ll have to tell me, because I don’t accept all of those on an equal footing. I have talked to people who gave me any of those reasons for choosing their preferred language - maybe with a slight bias towards the “I’m too old to change now” argument, which I personally don’t find acceptable at all. Hearing those reasons might be interesting because one could then profit from other people’s experience with any of these languages for a future project. Regarding R, I’d like to hear how it compares to Gnuplot for plotting in other people’s opinion. For scientific computations, I use the language kan/sm1. You can do Groebner basis calculations in differential ideals in it, (that’s to do with algebra) not so much because I like its syntax so dearly, but I prefer it over Maple and Mathematica, because I like their syntax even less and they don’t have an efficient implementation of a b-function, which is something I need quite dearly ( and am too lazy to implement myself). I also use Ruby to put together programs for kan/ms1, and when I say that Ruby is “more general” than R (notice the quotes!), I mean that it has been designed as a general computer language, not just for one particular field of applications, as statistical evaluations. That’s no criticism of R, though. This generality implies that you can use bindings for R from Ruby, and thus use R without having to learn R’s syntax from scratch (maybe just for one dataset evaluation - which could be as far you can tell when you first use R). If you use Ruby and kan/sm1, there are several packages on Rubyforge to let you define multivariate polynomials in Ruby and calculate with them in Ruby, so Ruby’s possibilities go beyond invoking some external program and reading out that program’s output, but you can treat that result in Ruby. That would not be possible for R for this particular task, so R is less general than Ruby. But I don’t mind - that language wasn’t designed for this purpose. R does statistics and plotting, and it’s good at that - but I still have no answer to the question we started with. Best regards, Axel ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2006, 9:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ed-borasky-and-his-second-favourite-programming-language/97086/2 "2006-07-04T21:06:45Z")
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote: > Regarding R, I’d like to hear how it compares to Gnuplot for plotting in > other people’s > opinion. I’ve never used Gnuplot – as I noted in an earlier post, the main thing R did well when I adopted it was boxplots. All the other stuff had little meaning at the time, although it does now. Gnuplot is just a plotting engine, though, isn’t it? You still have to do the analysis in some language, right? > For scientific computations, I use the language kan/sm1. > You can do Groebner basis calculations in differential ideals in it, Hmmm … a hard-core algebraist. Have you looked at Singular? > but I prefer it over Maple and Mathematica, because I like their syntax > even less and they don’t have an efficient implementation of a b-function, > which > is something I need quite dearly ( and am too lazy to implement myself). Maple and Mathematica are also neither free as in freedom nor free as in beer. I don’t know about kan/sm1, but Singular is open source. As are the “more general” algebra packages, Axiom and Maxima. Both will do Groebner bases, but the Singular package is probably a lot faster – they put a lot of effort into tuning it. ## Are there Ruby bindings for Singular? M. Edward (Ed) Borasky > **[世界杯竞猜彩票-世界杯官网竞猜（集团）有限公司](http://www.linuxcapacityplanning.com/)** > > 世界杯竞猜彩票一直以来遵守商业道德，世界杯官网竞猜坚持诚信为本，保证诚实经营。世界杯竞猜彩票先后成为安徽省电子商务协会理事单位、安徽省网商协会会员单位、合肥市电子商务协会理事单位、合肥市服务外包行业协会会员单位、安徽省云计算产业促进会会员单位。世界杯官网竞猜一直保持良好的技术及服务态度，更好地为客户服务。