As I descend into coding madness...

Huh. The "R" programming language. Never heard of it.

...

Documentation says it's related to S-Plus. Never heard of that, either.

...

Huh. This stuff sure is focused on doing statistics type things.

...

And here's some documentation that says it can also take data from SAS. I've heard of SAS. That's a statistics package. I was the only biology student in that stats class that was good at it. SAS was fun. I liked playing with univariate data. But then we moved on to a different stats package for the second half of the course. What was it called ... S-Plus.

OH!

Too bad I didn't like S-Plus much.
Too bad that was ten years ago.
Too bad I can't remember anything about it, except it had objects.

Now why exactly are we using a stats package to do calculus?

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Conundrum of the day:

Should the database be sending the data to R? Or should R be getting the data out of the database? Which should be first, the chicken or the egg?

And do I increase my geekiness if I have command line interfaces open for PostgreSQL, R, and Matlab at the same time? What if I also open a session to IDL?