"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Day: October 2, 2013

Religious wars in the world of Statistics

Day 772 of 1000

I logged for one summer in North Idaho while I was in college.  Though I had worked in sawmills a lot, I found the logging culture both different and interesting.  There seemed to be a constant flame war going on about which cork boots were best (White is the brand I remember).  There were also continuous arguments about chainsaws (Stihl, Husqvarna, etc.), the “right” way to file you saw chain (whether to do it yourself or have someone else do it), and a million other work and tool related subjects.  It is really not much different in the world of of programming.  There is always a struggle to get everyone on the same page with respect to programming languages, development environments, debuggers, hardware, etc., etc.

I got a kick out of the seventh item on this list in an article at Simply Statistics.  It points to an article about using something called Hadoop to deal with “big data” problems.  I am just starting to learn more about different statistical tools, so it was great to be able to glean information about tools that are new to me from this article like pandas and scalding.  The pop-culture element of the article is the reason I thought to right about it here.  The disdain with which the author writes about Hadoop is more than matched in the comments section below the post.  I especially like an aside written by one of the commenters in response to a commenter before him who extolled the virtues of  language named Erlang while hammering everything else:

[Edit: I have had a poke around, and you appear to have a bit of a history of trolling and flaming-anything-that-isn’t Erlang, so if you don’t mind, I will take your criticism with a grain of salt.]

Christian and I discuss this kind of thing pretty regularly.  It is hard not to get caught up in the religious wars.  It is something I have to fight on a regular basis.  In industry it is critical to do what is best for the company.  Sometimes that means reuse of a really, really bad code base to get something to market quickly.  Sometimes it means using almost dead cult languages like Delphi and Haskell (see, I still have some religion) that have little penetration in the real world.  As I get older I realize there is nothing new under the sun.  Before there were chain-saw arguments, I am sure there were axe arguments.

Monterrey 2013–An amazing place

We love Monterrey.  Lorena’s brother, Jorge, sent a link to this great video about that beautiful city.  It is really even better than this video shows.  Except the cheesy Yoga thing.

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