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by grayclhn 3865 days ago
I might be misrembering, but I think that it was assumed for a while that perl would be used for data munging, so there wasn't much effort put into that part of the language. That's being addressed now by packages, and a lot of the uptake in R seems to coincide with work by R developers to make the language less hostile to new users. (Have you used the bundled IDE? Satan's work again.)

BUT perl + R was a really nice combination for a while.