

The State of Statistics in Julia - wallflower
http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2012/12/02/the-state-of-statistics-in-julia/

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andrewvc
I tried julia last week looking for an R replacement. I was pretty excited but
the web REPL is broken on the current OSX build. Try as I might I could not
get the web repl to run when building it myself.

It still seems quite immature, but I'm _very_ excited about it's future.

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StefanKarpinski
We're phasing out the web repl since it's not actively developed anymore. At
some point I'm going to take a crack at providing a Julia backend to iPython
Notebook [1].

[1] [http://ipython.org/ipython-
doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook....](http://ipython.org/ipython-
doc/dev/interactive/htmlnotebook.html)

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andrewvc
That's unfortunate as I was trying to get an r-studio like experience.

~~~
StefanKarpinski
No reason that can't happen too, but the current web repl is more of a proof-
of-concept.

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pseut
This might be slightly off-topic, but are DataFrames intended to be similar to
R's data.frame, where the contents of the entire table are loaded into memory
and operated on all at once, or more like SQL with the possibility of
aggregate functions calculated incrementally? Since a lot of statistics can be
calculated incrementally (OLS, obviously, but even something like MLE based on
nonlinear optimization, if you allow for multiple passes through the dataset)
R's approach really bugs me... even though providing the right tools for an
aggregate function approach would be (I imagine) quite a bit more difficult.

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johnmyleswhite
DataFrames are in-memory. It sounds like you're describing what we're calling
DataStreams, which are still a work in progress, but do already exist. And
we're also building SGD descent for doing things like OLS incrementally.

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StefanKarpinski
It's rather amazing how far this has come in a very short time. Excellent
post, John!

