Rich Ackerman wrote:  
> William Denton wrote:
> > Are any of you using R?	(http://www.r-project.org/) 
> 
> My son uses it at Biogen Idec doing statistical genetics programming.
> He gave me a demo last weekend. It reminded me of my first programming
> language, APL :) He loaded data and created very nice visualizations
> in about five lines of code. Let us know how it works for you! 

You might also look into J.  Statistics is only one of its 
applications (I've used it for music, stock market analysis, and 
library statistical data; others use it for numerical analysis, 
actuarial uses, number theory, graphics, image processing, modeling 
and simulation, puzzle solving, time series, and many other fields of 
interest in both the arts and sciences).  J is a general (functional) 
programming language for array data, and I think it's far more 
powerful than R.  (However, that power comes at the price of a rather 
steep learning curve.)

Regarding the APL comment above: J is the advanced sibling/successor 
to APL <http://www.jsoftware.com/>.  Like APL in the 1960's, it was 
invented by Ken Iverson 20 years ago; the most visible difference is 
that it uses standard ASCII characters instead of the special APL 
characters.  The related array languages K and Q (developed by Arthur 
Whitney, a friend of Iverson) <http://kx.com/> are used by a number 
of major Wall Street firms to handle and analyze the billions of 
pieces of data generated daily.

Harvey