[equark]

It's interesting how the F# team is pushing F# to be the language for data-rich programming. Their Type Provider concept looks promising, but some of their demos still are comically difficult coming from a R/Matlab/Python style of data-rich programming. Of course coming from C#/Java it all looks amazing.

But I don't quite see how F# replaces R or Matlab, even with library support. Performance alone seems dubious value proposition, since packages like Jacket for Matlab make most computations extremely fast.

Anybody have experience where demand for strongly typed language is really needed for data analysis tasks?

[silverlake]

"Anybody have experience where demand for strongly typed language is really needed for data analysis tasks?"

Strong-typing is not really about performance, though it does help. It's about discovering more errors at compile-time rather than run-time.

[blasdel]

s/strong/static/g

http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/08/what-to-know-before...

[chc]

I think the pitch is that F# is halfway to Matlab without losing general programming power — a best of both worlds kind of thing.

[sliverstorm]

Yeah, Matlab seems to be pretty useless if you want to do anything besides pure math.

I mean, that's really all computers are at the core- math- but you know what I mean.

[Raphael]

I'd say computers are more applied math than pure math

[gaius]

Mathematica is more oriented towards pure maths (e.g. symbolic maniplation) and MATLAB more towards applied (numerical methods).

[konad]

At their core, computers are boolean logic, not arithmetic. Ironically, math is one of the things they are bad at, they are just quick.