[downerending]

It's based pretty directly on S, which was designed in the mid 1970s. Yeah, it has very rough edges here, but hard to argue that they should have foreseen the future back then.

That said, the real value in R seems to be the libraries. Has anyone looked at a shim that could make those libraries available to Python in a reasonably natural way? If that existed, the R language itself could be allowed to finally rest in peace.

[anthony_doan]

There is something to be said to build a programing language to solve a certain task in mind.

Being vector aware and having a dataframe support in R is much more elegant for me than Python's add on library. It's like Scala building on top of Java but trying to have an Actor paradigm vs Erlang built from get go around concurrency and choosing Actor as it's main concurrency paradigm. You can see this in other language on PHP and C++ let you be OOP but it's an after thought compare to Ruby or Python.

[downerending]

I'm not unsympathetic to this idea, but after learning my 87th domain-specific language that couldn't be bothered with reasonable control structures, or even solid error checking, it's really starting to wear.

Statisticians aren't that interested in writing a really good programming language. And why should they be? They have better things to do. The trick is to not take on responsibility for something you don't care about, if you can help it.

[bachmeier]

You can embed an R interpreter in any language with a C interface. That said, most of the complaints I see about R reflect preferences and prior programming experience with newer programming languages. While there are things I don't like about R, it's a Scheme without s-expressions, and overall I like it.

[cwyers]

There are various ways to call R from Python, or Python from R. They never end up being very idiomatic, which typically makes them a pain to work with.