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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