[CreRecombinase]

What is "actually programming"? Is fighting with your package manager (I'm looking at you python) "actually programming"? Is re-implementing functionality that exists elsewhere in the hipster language du jour (e.g rust, julia) "actually programming"? I totally concede that R itself is a fairly unremarkable lispy mostly functional programming language. What makes it stand out is it's emphasis on immutable, in-memory, array-based data structures. This means that 1) it's very straightforward to wrap highly performant C/C++/Fortran libraries 2) despite being a dynamically typed language, it's usually quite straightforward to reason about the type/shape of the inputs and outputs of a function 3) individual functions from one package can often be easily combined with functions from another package. I totally get it if any of this isn't your thing, but to write off a whole ecosystem as "ill-designed" (without literally any argument besides "my co-workers, and scientists in general, are stupid"), is pretty lazy.

[29athrowaway]

Rust was developed out of necessity by C++ users, it is not a hipster language.

I prefer using Rust rather than paying hundreds of thousands of dollars on a static analysis tool for C++.