The only reason to tolerate a language as terrible as R is that it has such astonishingly broad library support - there is basically no algorithm you can find on Wikipedia that doesn't have some sort of R implementation. Incanter will never have this, and tbh it's very difficult to create outputs as pretty as themed ggplots. For very simple statistical analysis Incanter's okay (and I've seen smart people build lots more on top of it), but even really basic model-fitting stuff isn't built in, and if you're not smart or just don't have the time, it'd be mad to commit to that environment.
It's a shame because structurally it's quite nice, and I did buy into the idea that Lisps were well suited to this sort of work, especially being very REPL focused.
I never really took a look at Weka since I am using the results commercially (or rather my clients do) and I think I "distribute" that software.
Now maybe I could make the case that I am not distributing the software but I write it in their name and on their bill. In other words, I can use it as long as my job is to write software (for them) instead of creating a product that I will sell.
Still, I prefer to stay away from it as long as possible but I agree it will be hard for some tasks such as decision trees which are unfortunately a very nice fire and forget algorithm.
There are people claiming that you can do most of classification and regression using logistic and linear regression, so I try to stick to that as long as possible and incanter allows for that.
https://github.com/joshuaeckroth/clj-ml/
The only reason to tolerate a language as terrible as R is that it has such astonishingly broad library support - there is basically no algorithm you can find on Wikipedia that doesn't have some sort of R implementation. Incanter will never have this, and tbh it's very difficult to create outputs as pretty as themed ggplots. For very simple statistical analysis Incanter's okay (and I've seen smart people build lots more on top of it), but even really basic model-fitting stuff isn't built in, and if you're not smart or just don't have the time, it'd be mad to commit to that environment.
It's a shame because structurally it's quite nice, and I did buy into the idea that Lisps were well suited to this sort of work, especially being very REPL focused.