R is a trash of a language. It doesn't have any sense of coherency to it at all.
They keep trying to fix the underlying problems by ducktaping paradigms on to it over and over (S3, S4, R6, etc). There's never a clear sense of the best way to do anything, but plenty of options to do a thing in a very hacky 'script-kiddy' way.
Looking out at the community of different projects it becomes clear that everyone is pretty lost as to what design principles should be used for certain tasks, so every repo has its own way of doing things (I know personal style occurs in other languages, but commonalities are much less recognizable in R projects).
It's tragic that such a large community uses it.
Trash language is a bit harsh. I'm not sure I would try to put an R project into production or build a huge project with it but, at the very least, R/R Studio was the best scientific calculator I've ever used. Was particularly great during college
Yep, this is a mark of someone that's never used R but has heard a lot of incredibly ill informed criticism around it.
One look of dplyr code over pandas would of course disabuse anyone of the notion that R is trash and the tragedy is Python will in the current state never have anything like that. That's the advantage of the language being influenced by Lisp vs not.
I agree that it is a trash language and that, outside that many frontier academic ideas are available and some plotting preferences are solidly prescriptive, it should be thrown into the trash bin.
Python, Julia when it gets its druthers for TTFP, Octave, Fortran, C, and eventually Rust. These are the tools I've found in use over and over and over again across business, government, and non-profits.
Everywhere R is used by the org I have seen major gaps in capacity to deliver specifically because R doesn't scale well.
I'm not emotionally invested in tools so am happy to identify the user experience and operational experience as "trash."
"Trash", despite its connotations of lacking value, is really just a chaotic disorganized mess of something made by artifice with dubious reclaim/reuse/recycle value. Being a subjective assessment, it is natural that one person's trash is a treasure to another.
I take issue with your implication that I'm emotionally invested in something when I shouldn't be. You are free to dislike R and not use it, but to claim that it's "trash" is to wrongly disavow its usefulness for the many people that do find it useful, and to cast aspersions on the judgement of all those people.
Hey, I apologize here, my point on emotional investment was that I, personally, am not emotionally invested in it and did not mean to cast aspersions at you for your defense of the language nor at people who have preferences for it. Specifically I meant that I'm comfortable enough in my understanding of the language to classify it and it's standard library as better in the garbage bin relative to alternatives available.
It's fine that people like it. What's good about it isn't unique, and what's unique about it isn't that great. And there are certainly switching costs for some orgs to consider.
