| By David Smith |
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| July 28, 2012 04:00 AM EDT |
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1,739 |
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.
New York Times: Bond Trading Loses Some Swagger Amid Upheaval
David Smith is Vice President of Marketing and Community at Revolution Analytics. He has a long history with the R and statistics communities. After graduating with a degree in Statistics from the University of Adelaide, South Australia, he spent four years researching statistical methodology at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, where he also developed a number of packages for the S-PLUS statistical modeling environment. He continued his association with S-PLUS at Insightful (now TIBCO Spotfire) overseeing the product management of S-PLUS and other statistical and data mining products.< David smith is the co-author (with Bill Venables) of the popular tutorial manual, An Introduction to R, and one of the originating developers of the ESS: Emacs Speaks Statistics project. Today, he leads marketing for REvolution R, supports R communities worldwide, and is responsible for the Revolutions blog. Prior to joining Revolution Analytics, he served as vice president of product management at Zynchros, Inc. Follow him on twitter at @RevoDavid
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