Publications by Derek-Jones
Parsing R code: Freedom of expression is not always a good idea
With my growing interest in R it was inevitable that I would end up writing a parser for it. The fact that the language is relatively small (the add-on packages do the serious work) hastened the event because it did not look like much work; famous last words. I knew about R’s design and implementation being strongly influenced by the world vi...
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Go faster R for Google’s summer of code 2012
The R Foundation has been accepted for Google’s summer of code and I thought I would suggest a few ideas for projects. My interests are in optimization and source code analysis, so obviously the suggestions involve these topics. There are an infinite number of possible optimizations that can be applied to code (well, at least more than the num...
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An academic programming language paper about R
The R language has passed another milestone, a paper aimed at the academic programming language community (or at least one section of this community) has been written about it, Evaluating the Design of the R Language by Morandat, Hill, Osvald and Vitek. Hardly earth shattering news, but it may have some impact on how R is viewed by nonusers of t...
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Incompetence borne of excessive cleverness
I have just got back from the 24 hour Data Science Global Hackathon; I was an on-site participant at Hub Westminster in London (thanks to Carlos and his team for doing such a great job looking after us all {around 50 turned up from the 100 who registered; the percentage was similar in other cities around the world}). Participants had to be regis...
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EU rules that computer languages cannot be copyrighted
The European Court of Justice has published its decision in SAS v WPL; the title of the press release says it all “The functionality of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright”. To summarise the background, World Programming Ltd developed a system that was capable of emulating the input/output behavio...
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Background to my book project “Empirical Software Engineering with R”
This post provides background information that can be referenced by future posts. For the last 18 months I have been working in fits and starts on a book that has the working title “Empirical Software Engineering with R”. The idea is to provide broad coverage of software engineering issues from an empirical perspective (i.e., the discussion ...
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Impact of hardware characteristics on detectable fault behavior
Preface. This is the first of what I hope will be many posts analysing experimental data, that will eventually end up in my empirical software engineering with R book (this experiment was chosen because it happens to be the one I am currently working on; having just switched to using Asciidoc I have a backlog of editing to do on previously writt...
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Success does not require understanding
I took part in the second Data Science London Hackathon last weekend (also my second hackathon) and it was a very different experience compared to the first hackathon. Once again Carlos and his team really looked after us. The data was released 24 hours before the competition started and even though I had spent less than half an hour looking at...
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My no loops in R hair shirt
Being professional involved with analyzing source code I get to work with a much larger number of programming languages than most people. There is a huge difference between knowing the intricate details of the semantics of a language and being able to fluently program in a language like a native developer. There are languages whose semantics I ...
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Descriptive statistics of some Agile feature characteristics
The purpose of software engineering research is to figure out how software development works so that the software industry can improve its quality/timeliness (i.e., lower costs and improved customer satisfaction). Research is hampered by the fact that companies are not usually willing to make public good quality data about the details of their s...
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