Comment by fithisux

Personally I use R for the occasional script or some tidyverse quick processing.

But the language has many rough edges

1. non standard eval is very weird, rlang fixes these shortcomings 2. unintuitive names or functions not belonging to packages, base has a mix of functions 3. S3 mixes with naming, no problem personally with S3 and S7 is even better, but mixing S3 names with ordinary names is unintuitive, keep snake case 4. data.frames are unintuitive, tidyverse fixes this 5. f(a=) seriously? or working with unintuitive functions in body for discrete ranges of function arguments? 6. no imports per file in packages, I can live with this .. still ... 7. AST functions are unintuitive

R has some excellent parts:

non-standard evaluation, AST in the base language, lazy evaluation

but it is being killed by the bad parts

I think all the external fixes and sanity in names should go into base

but it will take a lot of time if it ever happens due to legacy.

Julia fixes many of these not as elegantly as R but it's pragmatic approach is too attractive.