This is really cool. I have been learning some stats, data mining, and machine learning stuff and I'm compelled by Incanter. I can see why a lisp is a good choice for statisical computing, with lists of data and easy composition of calculations.
Thanks to both the Incanter and FlightCaster devs for the generosity.
Using lisp as language for statistics has it's precursors like xlisp-stat. In a historical perspective, S (or similar functional languages) have taken the crown though.
Somewhere in the archives of comp.lang.lisp there is a post by Ross Ihaka where he mentions that they wanted to use scheme or another lisp-like language for R, but decided to go with something more familiar to most potential users. If I remember right, he said if they could do it all over again, they would use lisp.
IMHO the popularity of R is grounded on its compatibility with S/S-Plus. if they hadn't used S as language, they would have never reached the position where they are now and R wouldn't be increasingly adapted as standard statistics package---competing with and/or replacing SPSS/PASW, SAS, stata etc.
On the incanter homepage there is a link to http://www.jstatsoft.org/v13 which includes a few interesting articles.
Anyway, I find the integration with java interesting. That's a strong argument in favour of a solution like incanter.
