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My exact thought. R has great tools but the language is wonky. That's not a dig against them. It wasn't designed by language designers. However, its interactive nature is great for data scientists. So it seems like Clojure (possibly Scala) is a better fit than Java.

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it isn't the R syntax, as a language, it is rather the package ecosystem and the invested resources it encapsulates.

I'm confused. Are you saying that the package ecosystem is what makes R attractive, or that it's what makes it inscrutable?

I'm sure he's saying that package ecosystem is what makes R attractive.

The ecosystem didnt come into existence by magic. The early adopters did have a choice into which language to invest their time. Obviously the R syntax alone was enough of an incentive to starts building useful libraries in it, instead of lisp, python, etc.

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