The R language gets a brief mention in an article in yesterday's New York Times on automated bond trading:
The traders here are mostly educated in math or physics, often outside the United States, and their desks are piled high with textbooks like the “R Graphs Cookbook,” for working with obscure computer programming languages.
R an obscure programming language? Perhaps the finance desk should drop by the graphics desk sometime, where R is routinely used for the Times' interactive online and print graphics features. (A visualization of the last century of drought in the US is a particularly elegant recent example.) A language which currently ranks #12 amongst all languages in the Transparent Language Popularity Index can hardly be called obscure. R was also the subject of a feature article in, er, the New York Times.
New York Times: Bond Trading Loses Some Swagger Amid Upheaval
Obscure? Relative to BASIC and COBOL even C, absolutely. Stat pack languages are, by definition, niche. Hey Jude!
Posted by: Robert Young | July 25, 2012 at 20:33