2022 Release

Lisp-Stat 1.0.0
By Steve Nunez |

Overview

This release is the third major refactoring of Lisp-Stat, with particular emphasis on plotting. I have attempted to make plotting as easy in Lisp-Stat as it is in Vega-Lite, upon which it is based. In addition, much clean-up and polishing of sharp edges has taken place as a result of using Lisp-Stat on real-world projects.

As always, comments and contributions are welcome.

What’s New

Lisp-Stat

  • Data loading functions akin to R’s data function. You can now load the Lisp-Stat data sets with this function, e.g. (data :mtcars). The mechanism is extensible for add on packages to use as well.
  • Additional cleansed and annotated data sets included.

Plot

  • The plotting system has been completely reworked. For example, to create a scatter plot of horsepower vs. miles per gallon:
(asdf:load-system :plot/vega)
(data :vgcars)
(plot:plot
  (vega:defplot hp-mpg
  `(:title "Horsepower vs. MPG"
    :data (:values ,vgcars)
    :mark :point
	:encoding (:x (:field vgcars:horsepower)
	           :y (:field vgcars:miles-per-gallon)))))

Data-frame

  • Paid technical debt, refactored, made ready for future progress.
  • Added filter-rows, remove-columns, remove-columns! and rename-column!.
  • Improved unit tests.
  • Added column types: categorical (factor) and temporal.
  • Improved error handling, conditions and restarts.
  • Working prototypes for stack, split-apply-combine, sort operations.

Array Operations

Array operations has been rehomed and now lives in the Lisp-Stat github organisation. Significant improvements to documentation over the previous repository.

Documentation

There probably isn’t a part of the documentation that hasn’t been touched. Improvements in all areas, including organisation, expanded topic coverage and quality improvements.

Semantic Versioning

Previously Lisp-Stat used semantic versioning appropiate for binary patch distribution. In this scheme the major number indicates whether or not the lisp image needed to be cold started, and a minor version indicating if a patch could be applied. Since it’s unlikely we’ll have a viable patching system in the open source Common Lisp world anytime soon, we’ve moved to semantic versioning for source releases. Since the semantics of versioning are different, all systems have been reset to 1.0.0. Going forward we’ll use the major.minor.patch scheme.