PERL, Python and R

If you stumbled up on a non-English website in the earlier days of the internet, you had to cut and paste the test into a translator and figure out what it said. Even prior to that, you had to figure out the language, which was not easy in the first place.

Can we get rid of

All programs written in C, C++ and Java need to be ‘compiled’ so that human-readable form (English text) gets translated to a form understood by computers (0s and 1s). Usually, the step of compilation is done separately prior to running the programs on real data. Morever, programs written in C, C++ and Java have to follow very rigid structure so that the compilation process produces the most efficient code. Those sequence of steps were helpful, if computers were used for solving large problems, but were quite inefficient for using computers to do some quick and dirty work (such as removing the first column of a large table).

Thanks to Moore’s law, computers became quite powerful by early 1990s making room for little bit of sloppiness in programming. PERL came from UNIX shell programming. (1989) Python came from C. (1989) They do not need to be compiled. –> Interpreted.

Computers became even faster allowing room for another level of abstraction–> R (1993)