So, I am writing some sort of a statistics program (actually I am redesigning it to something more elegant) and I thought I should use a language that was created for that kind of stuff (dealing with huge data of stats, connections between them and some sort of genetic/neural programming).
To tell you the truth, I just want an excuse to dive into lisp/smalltalk (aren’t smalltalk/lisp/clojure the same? – like python and ruby? -semantics-wise) but I also want a language to be easily understood by other people that are fond of the BASIC language (that’s why I didn’t choose LISP – yet :D).
I also checked Prolog and it seems a pretty cool language (easy to do relations between data and easier than Lisp) but I’d like to hear what you think.
Thx
Edit: I always confuse common lisp with Smalltalk. Sorry for putting these two langs together. Also what I meant by ‘other people that are fond of the BASIC language‘ is that I don’t prefer a language with semantics like lisp (for people with no CS background) and I find Prolog a little bit more intuitive (but that’s my opinion after I just messed a little bit with both of them).
Is there any particular reason not to use R? It’s sort of a build vs. buy (or in this case download) decision. If you’re doing a statistical computation, R has many packages off the shelf. These include many libraries and interfaces for various types of data sources. There are also interface libraries for embedding R in other languages such as Python, so you can build a hybrid application with a GUI in Python (for example) and a core computation engine using R.
In this case, you could possibly reduce the effort needed for implementation and wind up with a more flexible application.
If you’ve got your heart set on learning another language, by all means, do it. There are several good free (some as in speech, some as in beer) implementations of Smalltalk, Prolog and LISP.
If you’re putting a user interface on the system, Smalltalk might be the better option. If you want to create large rule sets as a part of your application, Prolog is designed for this sort of thing. Various people have written about the LISP ephiphany that influences the way you think about programming but I can’t really vouch for this from experience – I’ve only really used AutoLISP for writing automation scripts on AutoCAD.