Is that it? Future-proof and REPL?
R code from the 90s still runs today on the latest versions and everyone uses a REPL to write their code. I don't see a lot of people jumping into R any time soon, quite the opposite in fact.
R code from the 90s still runs today on the latest versions and everyone uses a REPL to write their code. I don't see a lot of people jumping into R any time soon, quite the opposite in fact.
The internals itself in R actually sound quite lispy: both values and codes are SEXP (S-expressions).
R is inspired by Scheme and Common Lisp; it has first-class functions, multiple dispatch.
https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Interface98...
"This decision, more than anything else, has driven the direction that R development has taken. As noted above, there are quite strong similarities between Scheme and S, and the adoption of the S syntax for our interpreter produced something which “felt” remarkably close to S."
I parse code, every time I read source. Ease-of-parsing is absolutely a quality worth optimizing for. (The difference is, ease for who? Optimize for a human parser, not a machine parser.)