R is fundamentally flawed. It tries to merge two highly conflicting goals: a productive analytics environment and a programming language.
To do the first really well means automating away many of the issues that would crop up in the second allowing R to 'just work'. Because of that nothing beats R for getting to an answer as fast as possible (not even Python) at the cost of making it more difficult to productionise a solution in pure R.
Given its huge popularity and free-nature the benefits clearly outweigh the costs by a large factor.
Not sure I buy this. R is a language with parser and interpreter. Parser spits out an AST and interpreter evaluates nodes according to rules. This is the same in every other sane language. AST is pretty much the same in every language. There is no reason R’s parser and language can’t be replaced with something sane.
I agree that R shouldn't be used in production, but R is great for prototyping different analytical models before porting them over to Python or another language.
Same here and I think that’s exactly how its meant to be used.
Even so, if you want to use R as the production system, you shouldn’t implement the jumbled spaghetti code an iterative analysis involves just for your own sanity's sake. A rewrite is always required at which point hello Python
To do the first really well means automating away many of the issues that would crop up in the second allowing R to 'just work'. Because of that nothing beats R for getting to an answer as fast as possible (not even Python) at the cost of making it more difficult to productionise a solution in pure R.
Given its huge popularity and free-nature the benefits clearly outweigh the costs by a large factor.