> it is written by statisticians, not programmers. They'd write the same garbage in Python
I guess I should take offense as a statistician. But its a fairly common complaint. The reality is, most of us statisticians are trying to compute a result. Like once. Or sometimes twice. For a paper. Or a task. If someone comes to me with a time series and asks me to test it for stationarity, or find the p lags to make it MA(p) stationary, they aren't asking me to write a program. The goal is not reproducibility. The goal is a fast answer. I've used R at trading desks & financial institutions - the goal has seldom been "run the same program again, but with this new input". If that was the case, I would write a function & stick it in a nice library with documentation. But these aren't tech firms. We aren't shipping software. The goal is to compute something fast so you can get on with life & make the trade, or draft the next paragraph in your paper, or... Like if they give me a set of bespoke mortgages with some hairy constraints & ask me to compute the value at risk, there is not much point in building some VaR function. Because its a once in a while thing. Next time it will involve a different set of args & they'd be different constraints & so forth. So just write some 10 line script & get the number & move on. Yeah, sometimes I would stash the script in some repo & write a 1-line comment on how it works - but its kinda pointless, it doesn't get much play/reuse. We aren't programmers in that sense, we are just trying to solve problems.
My kid knocked on my office door yesterday. He's in some AoPs course where they use generating functions to count stuff. So he had a problem about the number of ways to add three odd numbers to make 1001. He had worked out the algebra & gotten some number, but before he hits Submit, he wants to doublecheck with me because wrong answers have a penalty. Now, I don't have the time to go back to school and learn what is a generating function. And I don't want to write lots of for loops & if statements & fight with syntax errors & so forth. So my 1-liner in R
dim(subset(expand.grid(a=seq(1,1001,2), b=seq(1,1001,2), c=seq(1,1001,2)), a+b+c==1001))
tells me there are 125250 ways. He says he got the same number with generating functions. Boom done! So that's what R is for. Quick & easy.