It has some really great statistical and data science packages that were well ahead of the competition 10-15 years ago. The web frameworks were good enough for dashboards and what most people were using R for.
But if you wanted to write fast and elegant nom-vectorized code, R is really lacking. I left it for Julia for that reason.
Julia is pretty good at basic data science. Working with dataframes is comparable to R's data.tables with the benefit that I don't need to switch languages if I want to run a fast loop over some data as part of a calculation or use a custom data structure.
I'm not a fan of pandas, so I'd say Julia and R beat python at basic dataframe manipulation. Nothing beats kdb+/q at dataframes though imo.
Have you tried Polars in Python? When you get going it's pretty similar to tidyverse, except you're chaining methods instead of piping, and it's lazily evaluated + parallel because of the underlying Rust engine. IME it's tidyverse > polars > pandas > data.table in terms of ergonomics
I agree somewhat with you - nonetheless a FastAPI + Alembic + SQLAlchemy alternative in R would make it possible to use it as a general purpose language
It has some really great statistical and data science packages that were well ahead of the competition 10-15 years ago. The web frameworks were good enough for dashboards and what most people were using R for.
But if you wanted to write fast and elegant nom-vectorized code, R is really lacking. I left it for Julia for that reason.