In Memoriam: XLispStat
The Forgotten Statistical Language
It is 2022, and if you ask a statistician or a data scientist what their favorite programming language is, the answer will likely be R or Python. (Just in case, I reserve some breathing space for Java, Julia, Scala, and their devoted followers.) However, the answer would have been very different in 1999.
The first public version of Python was released in 1991, but NumPy, the optimized numerical core for Python, did not show up until 2005, followed by Pandas in 2008.
The first version of R was officially released as open-source in 1995, but the “stable beta” was not available until 2000. It is true that S, the predecessor to R, had been around since 1976, but it was proprietary and cost a fortune.
So, what did statisticians and future data scientists rely on in 1999? The old-schoolers adored the reliability and performance of Fortran. The “hackers” coded their algorithms in C. The few and the brave turned to Lisp.
Despite a common belief, Lisp the language was not created in the 1970s for the need of implementing artificial intelligence. In fact, Lisp (1958) is only one year…
