Algorithmic Trading Group Forum - What is 'R' language ?

Maltamir Newbie Offline I like this forum ! Posts: 36 Paris Gender:	What is 'R' language ? 06/30/08 at 23:15:53 'R' language project may be a revolution for quantitative and algo-trading cause it offers basic and easy methematical function. You don't need anymore to build data analysis, the language offers it ! Have a look to 'R' project web page : http://www.r-project.org/
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Co0olCat

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Re: What is 'R' language ?
Reply #1 - 06/30/08 at 23:32:31

Maltamir wrote on 06/30/08 at 23:15:53:

'R' language project may be a revolution for quantitative and algo-trading cause it offers basic and easy methematical function. You don't need anymore to build data analysis, the language offers it !

Have a look to 'R' project web page :

http://www.r-project.org/

I do agree that R has many positive features. I am using it myself as a weapon of choice for prototyping. At the same time one needs to realize its limitations. First, there is no classic debuging facilities. Second, it is a collection of wrapped Fortran and C/C++ routines. Observed R performace (speed) is not the same as the code complitely written in C/C++. As a result, I do not think that production platform would be written in R.

EDITED: What about Python? You can call R from Python. You can compile Python code and produce stand-alone executable (which is not the case for R).

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3John Newbie Offline Posts: 3 Tokyo Gender:	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #2 - 07/28/08 at 13:33:16 > EDITED: What about Python? You can call R from Python. Another choice for Python would be Sage... http://www.sagemath.org/
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qroach Full Member Offline Posts: 102 London Gender:	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #3 - 07/28/08 at 16:09:48 I have just tried to use it and R rules! Which proves the point that functional languages or languages with functional features have future.
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Phoenix

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Re: What is 'R' language ?
Reply #4 - 08/28/09 at 05:03:31

Hi all,

I also use R for prototyping. I saw Tinn-R mentionned on another thread. I didn't know something like that existed. I will certainly try it. It looks great!

I am also considering the use of Haskell (a functional language) to perform machine learning experiments (GA for example) to discover good trading strategies. See http://www.haskell.org/ for more information. Jane Street in the US is using OCAML, another FP language. They have a video to explain why they use it: http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61

Is there anybody here using FP languages other than R?

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RoBiK Newbie Offline I like this forum! Posts: 2	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #5 - 08/28/09 at 10:17:40 What about F# ? For the most part it is syntax compatible wit OCaml. A functional language with the full power of .NET Framework and CLR behind it. It will be fully integrated in the Visual Studion 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 release (currently in beta). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Sharp_%28programming_language%29
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Phoenix Newbie Offline I like this forum! Posts: 5 Montreal Gender:	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #6 - 08/29/09 at 00:59:12 Hi! To be honest, I am hesitating between F# and Haskell. I find Haskell to be cleaner than F# but F# has .NET behind it and a good IDE in Visual Studio. I think that if Haskell had a good IDE then people would not be so hesitant in adopting it. Haskell has good libraries too. Do you use F# yourself?
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RoBiK

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Re: What is 'R' language ?
Reply #7 - 08/31/09 at 10:13:42

my general language of choice is c# so f# would be a good complement for me. until now i didn't learned f# but i already have some books ready and will do it soon.
C# is also interesting, because it already integrates some features borrowed from functional programming like anonymous methods, anonymous types, initializatiors for collections and arrays, iterators, lambda expressions, extension methods etc.

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Phoenix

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Re: What is 'R' language ?
Reply #8 - 09/01/09 at 01:53:02

Hi RoBiK,

I know (and like) C#. The reason why I consider Haskell is that I already used Miranda which is quite similar and I loved it. Now a functional language is a functional language and I would probably like F# too but...

Also, Haskell is compiled natively so it is faster than .NET which runs on a virtual machine (although this might not be that big an advantage depending on what I am going to do).

The reason I asked about functional languages is that there is supposed to be "a lot" of people doing financial stuff with them (such as Jane Street). I was curious if some people here actually do that with languages such as OCaml, F# or Haskell. I am curious to see how things went/are.

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willc

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Re: What is 'R' language ?
Reply #9 - 11/11/09 at 13:36:02

For some reason, majority of the books I have read refers to C++. They explain that the multiparadigm language allows flexibility to implement different ways of doing things quantitatively. However, since many of you have brought up the use of R, I will take a look at R. Thanks for the recommendations.

As for functional programming languages, I was actually planning to try Scala. I did some research and it seems like Scala is one of the most popular functional programming languages right now.

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Lawrence Newbie Offline I like this forum! Posts: 5	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #10 - 11/20/10 at 03:32:35 I like R because it is good for analyzing large data set. Very good set of functions. Love it.
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statstrader Newbie Offline I like this forum! Posts: 27	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #11 - 11/20/10 at 05:01:45 Hey All, I haven't been by for a while, but it looks as if activity is picking up. FWIW, there are many examples on R and a great new book with many R based trading examples based on data mining covered here. http://intelligenttradingtech.blogspot.com/
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danielfuentes Newbie Offline I like this forum! Posts: 1	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #12 - 06/30/11 at 15:54:27 I think R is heading for the right direction... have you made any experience with R in the Cloud yet? I did some first calculations on www.cloudnumbers.com and I must say that in terms of speed its quite awesome, HPC is simply another dimension...
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Algo Designer Forum Administrator Offline Nihil desperandum Posts: 182 Sydney Gender:	Re: What is 'R' language ? Reply #13 - 07/01/11 at 00:38:45 I couldn't agree more! I have recently made it my primary strategy development environment. Thank you for sharing the R in the Cloud link! This is something I have been looking for.
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Poll
Question: I like to use 'R' because...
It has purely quantitative scripts 0 (0%) It's easy for mathematicians 4 (50%) It's faster than C++ 0 (0%) It's Open source ! 2 (25%) A complete language 1 (12.5%) It's avant-guarde for trading 1 (12.5%) Total votes: 8 « Created by: Maltamir on: 06/30/08 at 23:15:53 »

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