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Comment by northlondoner | Hacker News Reader

Yes, R is a proper general purpose programming language. Turing complete, functional, procedural, object oriented.../

Just in case someone reads this far and sees blubber's confident "No." Blubber is definitely wrong here. I used to do all of my programming in R. Throw the question into an LLM if you're wondering if R has a package like ___ in python.

I know people who used Visual Basic for all of their programming. I'd say No either way unless people explained to me without bursting out into laughter that they also have extensive experience with, e.g., Kotlin, Rust, C#, Java etc. and still prefer VB or R for non-trivial programs.

Of course R isn't a complied language and probably not the same category as C/Rust as systems language but is not in the same category as VB. R is a serious scientific programming language used in non-trivial programs for industrial applications. See Posit's customers. I suggest John Chambers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Chambers_(statistician) ) book, he explain how he designed S language, R's grandfather so to speak, Software for Data Analysis ( https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-75936-4 ).

This isn't about compilation vs interpretation. R is simply badly designed as a programming language. This doesn't change just because its inventor wrote a book.

I do.

And I'm still waiting for your examples of "established R packages with bugs caused by R weirdness".

blubber, I think there might be some misconceptions. Just for the record.

R is not actually competing with those languages. R's design purpose is different. it is a general purpose computational language for scientists. There are FFIs (Foreign Function Interfaces) for all those languages.

R-Kotlin-Jave: https://journal.r-project.org/articles/RJ-2018-066/ R-Rust: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/using_rust.html R-C# : https://github.com/Open-Systems-Pharmacology/rsharp/

R is supporting C integration natively anyhow (see Chambers's book.

Regarding VB reference. VB was used in finance a lot to do some advanced maths. just a side remark.

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