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There's also the fantastic "tidytable" library. I wouldn't want to implement multi-headed self attention in either of those libraries though.

I've done only very simple ML stuff using R and it never feels like exactly the right tool.

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I had to write a normal codebase in R exactly one time and it was one of the weirdest and most unpleasant coding experiences I've had. After that, I decided R is tidyverse and a handful of stats libraries. If you need more, reach for another tool.

I never understood the appeal of tidyverse. I have a colleague who, like you, thinks that R is tidyverse. He also has the nasty habit of starting Excel formulas with a '+' sign.

The main attraction of tidyverse is that it's easy to copy-paste code for common cases. If there's no ready recipe for something, it's usually just not done, or some "technical person" is called to do it.

R is used mostly as a fancy calculator, which is fine in itself, but it makes the comparisons to general purpose languages like Python quite apples-to-oranges.

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