# Re: ed borasky and his second favourite programming language

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ed-borasky-and-his-second-favourite-programming-language/97088>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [July 4, 2006, 9:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-ed-borasky-and-his-second-favourite-programming-language/97088 "2006-07-04T21:06:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**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/97088/1 "2006-07-04T21:06:54Z")

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Dear Ed,

thank you for your reply - it crossed my reply to Matthew, so I’ll  
update my  
statement  
by saying that my question “why does Ed Borasky” like R is now answered  
and  
in  
a very informative way.

I am a mathematician myself, and I’ll agree that in the field of  
biological  
modelling, where  
I am working in, there’s a lot of statistics, and of course I knew of R  
for  
doing  
statistics, and i like it so again: no criticism of R.  
My point was just that what I like about R needn’t have any connection  
with  
what  
you like about R - otherwise there’d one important reason less maintain  
mailing lists.

For instance, I don’t agree with your point

Well, first of all, being a mathematician, I’ll make the claim that  
_any_ sufficiently large task, programming or otherwise, has _some_  
statistics in it. :).

There’s graph theory, group theory, combinatorics ,…  
If you do solving of polynomial equations in many variables, to model a  
problem  
of this field, you can use Groebner bases I was talking about in my  
last  
email.  
The problem is that generically, the result you’ll get is of twice  
exponential  
complexity in the number of input variables, that is to say, you’ll  
get to order of 2^(2^(n/2))) terms as a result, where n is the number of  
input  
variables as a worst case. This will eat up all your memory, no matter  
how  
much you have. A lot of work is going on to reduce that number , and  
this  
requires a lot of programming.

But I value your response and I’ll think about it in the near future,  
when I  
come  
back to using R.

Best regards,

Axel