Comment by pjmorris

I'm willing to be a cup of coffee that the OP's degree and Atkinson's advice preceded the existence of R. I'm going to excerpt a mid-80's interview of Butler Lampson from Susan Lammer's book 'Programmers At Work' to illustrate my guess at what Atkinson might've been thinking...

LAMPSON: I used to think that undergraduate computer-science education was bad, and that it should be outlawed. Recently I realized that position isn’t reasonable. An undergraduate degree in computer science is a perfectly respectable professional degree, just like electrical engineering or business administration. But I do think it’s a serious mistake to take an undergraduate degree in computer science if you intend to study it in graduate school.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

LAMPSON: Because most of what you learn won’t have any long-term significance. You won’t learn new ways of using your mind, which does you more good than learning the details of how to write a compiler, which is what you’re likely to get from undergraduate computer science. I think the world would be much better off if all the graduate computer-science departments would get together and agree not to accept anybody with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Those people should be required to take a remedial year to learn something respectable like mathematics or history, before going on to graduate-level computer science. However, I don’t see that happening.