[noelwelsh]

I think the general consensus is that R is a terrible language with a lot of useful libraries. I especially like that R claims to be inspired by Scheme, but the memo seems to have been "Make sure we f*ck this all up" taped to the front of the "Lambda the Ultimate" papers[1]. In particular, lexical scoping was one of the key innovations in Scheme and R has pervasively buggered up their implementation, from not distinguishing between defining and mutating a variable to making the default save/load procedures mutate the environment. OMG does R drive me insane (as a programming language person.)

[Saying "there is package on CRAN that fixes this" is not a solution. A language shouldn't require extensive knowledge of the ecosystem to get the basics working properly.]

[1] Scheme was introduced to the world in the "Lambda the Ultimate" series of papers. See http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

[hadley]

No, that is not the consensus. R is (at its heart) a beautiful language that is extremely well suited to its domain. Most people who use R are not professional programmers (or even identify as programmers) so it's not surprising that there's a lot of bad code written in R.