The Huffington Post and the Future of Statistical Computing

Via the Huffington Post copied from Quora:

 

How do you see statistical computing evolving over the next ten to twenty years?originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by Hadley Wickham, Chief Scientist, RStudio, on Quora:

“How do you see statistical computing evolving over the next ten to twenty years?”

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” - Niels Bohr. I probably shouldn’t answer this question because I’m likely to make predictions that will come back to haunt me. (In 2004, Bill Gates predicted that “spam will be a thing of the past in two years time.”) I’ll take a stab at it anyway:

1. Open source and open science will continue to gain importance. It will become increasingly difficult for closed source statistical environments to survive.
2. We are likely to see at least one alternative implementation to R that has substantially better performance. The most promising candidate at this time is rho.
3. Data storage tools (like databases) will continue to gain more stat/ML tools. The needs of data science will drive much innovation in database space over the next ten years.
4. A new generation of tools (including both IDEs and ML algorithms) will more fluently combine the strengths of humans and computers.