son is forced to observe
I'm sorry to hear that. What level of education is that establishment supposed to provide? What would the son prefer to do instead?
The stuff is currently done less or more in R which is considered being pain in the ass.
There are probably faster ways of easing the pain in the ass than rewriting everything in Perl. After all, the math involved is complicated, so re-implementing it from scratch in likely to result in a lot of bugs, but it's already been done by a well-known member of the community and relied upon by a lot of people. R is a bit confusing after Perl because of its pass-by-value nature and generics-based OOP, but it can be written in all kinds of paradigms, and the CRAN code quality is really high, especially for packages reviewed by ROpenSci.
The end result is that the desired plot could be a one-liner in R, depending on the format of the available data and one package being installed: plot(survival::survfit(Surv(time, status) ~ x, data = read.table('data.txt')))
Care to share your frustrations? Or would you like to send a mail to the R-help mailing list? It's mostly friendly, like PerlMonks.
