[ergodiclife]

TL;DR. I just have two things to say:

R worshippers: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Interactively manipulating tables and producing visualizations is not what software engineers/programmers on HN would call "programming". Try learning a compiled programing language like C and creating a tool or three.

R haters: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." Remember, R was designed by statisticians for statisticians -- nothing more, nothing less. Try manipulating a tabular dataset and producing visualizations in R, and see how easy and painless it is. There's a good reason behind all the hype.