Joel Boehland's Blog

All your datasets R belong to us

2010-02-03T12:00:00-08:00

I would like to introduce Rincanter, a binding for Clojure/Incanter to the R language for statistical computing. This is a thin layer over the existing Java/R bindings done by the folks at rosuda.org. Why did I write this? Thanks to the hard work of Rich Hickey, David Liebke and others, you can already do impressive statistical data-mining tasks using only Clojure. However, the R project has a huge body of work of libraries and datasets that the much smaller Incanter community won't be able to match, at least in the short term. Unless…we can provide an easy to use bridge that would allow us to work mostly in Clojure and break into the R cookie jar for its datasets and function libraries when we need to. So, the goals for this project are:

Short Term:
- Provide access to the vast datasets available in R to Clojure/Incanter users. This requires that we can convert between R data types and Clojure/Incanter data types. For the most part this is working.
- Provide access to the large body of R packages and function libraries to fill in the gaps where Clojure and Incanter don't have functional coverage. This is partially working, but there are probably quite a few places where the Clojure side and the R side just won't match up without some serious fudging.
Long Term
- Provide a scaffold for porting R packages, functions and datasets over to what many people believe is a stronger base language. While R is an impressive language in many ways, even some of its Founders think that a full featured lisp could be a better way forward for basing an interactive statistical environment on. I would like people to strongly consider Clojure for that position.

A quick walkthrough

This will show a quick example showing how we can access R datasets available remotely on CRAN and import them into Incanter. We will be interacting with Incanter and R inside a REPL session.

To start with, you will need to get Rincanter up and running. There are some fairly detailed instructions for doing this on the project Home Page.

$ cd /path/to/where/you/downloaded/rincanter
$ lein repl

You should now have a REPL running with the required classes and packages loaded. Now we are ready for an interactive session. This will just be a very simple example showing how we can access R datasets available remotely on CRAN and import them into Incanter.

$ cd /path/to/where/you/downloaded/rincanter
$ lein repl

As you can see, it's fairly easy to grab any existing package and dataset on CRAN, download it, and pull the data into Incanter.

Blog Resurrected

2012-10-23T23:00:00-07:00

For over two years I have neglected this blog. I intend to begin writing posts again (sporadically). Look for new posts soon. I will start with some thoughts about the current state of Clojure's web development capabilities.

Funding Clojure

2009-12-18T17:19:37-08:00

Supporting the further development of Clojure

Quoting Rich Hickey:

   It is important when using open source software that you consider who
   is paying for it, because someone is. There is no such thing as free
   software.

Rich makes a great case: read the whole article here. I have chipped in despite it being a rather tight year, and if you are a user of Clojure, you should consider it as well. I think Rich is one of those rare individuals who makes our entire profession better. If you have followed any of the Clojure development lists, you can quickly pick up how thoughtful he is in furthering the design of Clojure.

A language designer must contend with many opposing forces when bringing a feature of a language to fruition. Is the feature powerful enough to justify the added complexity? Is the feature approachable to the bulk of the users of the language? Does the feature fit into the existing language as a whole? Time and time again I have seen proposed features go through the fire of Rich and the Clojure community's scrutiny, and I think they have succeeded in creating a language that has a great balance of power, elegance and beauty. It's also really fun to use.

I will comment on one other important aspect of Clojure that I have noticed as well- the welcoming environment that Rich encourages and enforces in the Clojure community. Trolls are not allowed to roam free, and usually are quickly (but politely) guided to either be civil, or to the exit. I think this has been a big component in the quick growth we have seen in the Clojure community, and I hope it survives as more and more people are drawn to the language.

I hope this unique funding strategy works. Already the response has been very positive (over 50% of the desired goal as of this writing). I look forward to seeing the further growth of the Clojure language and its community in 2010.

Hello Blog

2009-11-23T22:00:00-08:00

This is the first post of my blog. Expect posts related to my favorite programming languages (Python, Clojure, Ruby), and my favorite development tools (Emacs Org Mode).