Why has there been no serious research in statistical programming languages for 25 years?
- by Robert
The two main statistical languages today are S (in the form of R) and SAS, which today pretty much have the form they had 25 years ago.
Whatever usability problems or worker productivity problems they had then, they still have today.
I'm a data language designer, and I look at, largely, four aspects:
Usability (learning curve & readability - here Python scores
high)
Productivity (how long it takes to finish your work)
Flexibility (SAS and R don't have problems here, but a macro
library will)
Reliability (in the QA/reproducibility sense, usually a PL does
better than a GUI here)
By the way, I have a language that can produce complex statistical tables much faster than SAS (like 25 lines of code instead of several hundred lines of code). And I'm going to produce a language for data cleaning that will be great for usability (it'll be my third).
