[aydyn]

Youre wrong. Python is outpacing R in usage. Every metric you can find proves it. R also has fundamental issues and lacks serious development.

[vixen99]

Not to dispute because I have no idea so I'll assume you're correct. But how many metrics did you find and how were they obtained? And how would you know they are representative of all R users?

[0cf8612b2e1e]

For whatever it is worth, the TIOBE index lists Python as #1, R at #21.

Python is the first language many people are exposed to today. It has a library and tooling for every use case.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

[kuhewa]

R has a pretty particular use case though, Python use for statistical programming/data analysis would be an apples to apples comparison. People doing a coding 101 course in Python don't really count against the R user base.

[aydyn]

No one is disputing that R has usage in niche arenas.

[stoperaticless]

s/serious/hyped

[aydyn]

No. R fundamentally has not really improved in the past ~10 years. Do you know much about how R works?

Also try:

gsub('serious', 'hyped', x)

[lottin]

Maybe because it already does what it intends to do reasonably well? I mean, what do you think needs to be improved?

[smcin]

Here are 14 years of HN discussions/criticisms of R: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

"Does what it intends to do reasonably well" is going to be widely subjective, depending on whether the user's use-case is statistical/life-sciences vs more general purpose coding and relying on many packages; prototyping/experimentation vs production code; whether the user uses base-R, or tidyverse/data.table, etc.

Here are two of those many posts:

* An opinionated view of the Tidyverse “dialect” of the R language (July 5, 2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362626

* The R programming language: The good, the bad, and the ugly (epatters.org, 2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571659 -> https://www.epatters.org/post/r-lang/

[aydyn]

If youre unironically asserting that R already does everything well enough Im not going to take you seriously.

[skotobaza]

Yet you haven't provided any substantial points against it and assume that others will take you seriously...

[lottin]

I'm asking what needs to be improved, in your opinion.

That's a normal follow-up question that you should be able to answer. Otherwise, why are you even commenting?

[aydyn]

No you arent, youre clearly asking in a rhetorical way. Re-read your post.

Any criticism brought up you'd dismiss. Heres one: lack of native 64 bit integers.

[openrisk]

The issue is that even if you peel the hype (which is a fact), python is still far larger.

If you check e.g. the journal of open source software (which does not have much ML/AI bias), most of the papers are python, with an occasional R and julia submission.