[stewbrew]

It's important to keep this in mind though because R (or rather S) is primarily supposed to be used interactively. A prof of mine used to call the R REPL and then go on from there. He called an editor from the REPL, wrote source files from the REPL etc. Once you see someone working with R like that, you start seeing R as what it is.

The beautiful it is to be used interactively, it really takes a lot of practice to write reliable code that doesn't abort with some error now and then.

[jstx1]

I think the point about interactivity is pretty well understood. Another comment in the thread pointed out how the majority of people who write R do it in RStudio and RStudio's defaults push an interactive workflow on the users (the nature of the work you do has a similar effect). So even for someone very new to the language it's pretty obvious.