[goodside]

I'm a non-IT employee (but with a comp-sci background) working in the insurance sector, and I'm currently managing R adoption for a group of about 30 business analysts with minimal programming background.

Programming in the business world is screwed up beyond all imagination. The more money a given application is responsible for, the more likely it is that it's a house-of-cards (pun intended for MVS nerds). They're always mishmashes of COBOL, SAS, DFSORT, and random proprietary languages that have never been the subject of a third-party book, and were sold to a company that was sold to a company that was sold to CA Technologies back in the 1970s. Whatever these languages can't do is implemented through Escher-painting constructions of Excel references and VBA macros.

So, when people say that R has some issues, I say, "boo fucking hoo".

Most businesses suffer from an unnatural separation between IT and the business end. If business people want something programmed, they call IT. They don't learn Python and do it themselves, because Python is a "programming language". R is the first real language that business people are being encouraged to learn, because it's an "analysis environment". You have no idea how often I have to edit the word "programming" out of my presentations for this reason.

R will win in business because it's decent, and it's been around long enough to not be scary to managers. I'd be cautious about drawing comparisons to other languages that have undergone big design changes, because, as far as I can tell, the existence of a decent language in the business world is entirely without precedent.

(Edit: In case the above came off as sounding like a "non-hackers are idiots" rant, it wasn't meant as such. Many of the people that produce these hideous monstrosities of SAS and VBA code have PhDs in statistics and atmospheric sciences. You can be pretty smart without knowing how to write software well.)

[SoftwareMaven]

It is surprising how many business people aren't afraid to build monstrous macro-driven spreadsheets, but cringe at the thought of programming.

Makes me wonder if it is a UI problem. In the macro spreadsheet, you have data with code tied to it. In the programming world, you generally have code accessing data.

The abstractions might just be wrong for business people and a "simple" change could reduce a lot of IT pain.

[jacques_chester]

The reason that spreadsheets are popular is the same reason that many students trying to solve a maths problem immediately plug in the knowns, without rearranging terms first. It's fear of the abstract and comfort of the concrete.

[goalieca]

Ironically, it's a marketing problem.

[8ren]

Is it really true that business people use R directly? Being in Forbes is consistent with it...

I recall that SQL was intended to be used by business people... and it probably has been, sometimes; but I don't think it happens much. The days of early adoption might have differed, through appealing to the more adventurous business people (as R might be now).

One thing I know for a fact: business people use spreadsheets. I think making something that easy to get things done in is an incredible achievement. As an example, I think PHP has approached but not attained it.

[stcredzero]

How about a spreadsheet that uses R as its scripting language? (There's one of these for Python.)

[util]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RExcel

[8ren]

I don't know if business people do a lot of scripting (if any) in spreadsheets, because it side-steps the ease-of-use GUI of spreadsheet in favour of a programmer's UI...

[something]

look inside your average quantitative analysis or risk management group and you'll see that they definitely do.

[eliben]

Ah, you make really good points about non-programming people not thinking about R as a "programming language" and thus approaching it without fear.

I'm familiar with exactly the same phenomemon in the hardware verification world, where new tools and languages keep being invented just so that validation engineers can relax that they're not expected to "program" in a real language.