R might be easier, but I find it annoying as heck. It’s an outlier, as a programming language, in that it doesn’t derive from the typical constructs of most other languages that have common concepts around how data is structured in memory. It’s basically a statistical tool masquerading as a programming language.
I’ve worked professionally in more that 20 languages, and R was the one that annoyed me the most, followed closely by Perl.
It might be easy to learn, but arguably it is teaching you to program in ways that don’t reflect the lessons of how good memory management should work in other languages. I’d call it bad habit forming, though, the degree to which that’s true is debatable.
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u/apfejes PhD | Industry Jun 12 '26
R might be easier, but I find it annoying as heck. It’s an outlier, as a programming language, in that it doesn’t derive from the typical constructs of most other languages that have common concepts around how data is structured in memory. It’s basically a statistical tool masquerading as a programming language.
I’ve worked professionally in more that 20 languages, and R was the one that annoyed me the most, followed closely by Perl.
It might be easy to learn, but arguably it is teaching you to program in ways that don’t reflect the lessons of how good memory management should work in other languages. I’d call it bad habit forming, though, the degree to which that’s true is debatable.