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Comment by mjt0229 | Hacker News Reader

R is one of those languages that looks like it was designed in a vacuum by a very smart person. It has many common, modern PL constructs, but they're expressed syntactically in a way that in no way resembles any other language I've seen. The entire syntactic legacy of Algol, Pascal, C, etc, all are thrown by the wayside. Familiarity with any of those syntaxes felt to me like more of a liability than a help. That's not to say that the concepts don't apply, just the syntax.

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I agree, and I think that's exactly why an article like this exists. The R learning curve seems to be much gentler on people without too much serious programming experience in another language.

Have you looked at Julia at all? I'm only mildly familiar, but it looks super promising and I'm curious if the syntax there seems more normal or predictable for an experienced dev.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that - R for Programmers is exactly the kind of thing I'd need, even if it's not useful for my friends and family (largely scientists rather than programmers for whom the legacy of programming language syntax is completely unknown).

Julia looks cool; I think the syntax is meant to look familiar to people who've used Matlab or Octave extensively. I don't do tons of scientific computing, but Julia is on my list of tools to learn.

R is a 'rip-off' / open source re-implementation of the commercial S language by John Chambers. (There are some differences in scoping iirc). Haven't many of its 'modern' PL constructs already been used in Lisp (dialects) before?

Indeed, it's not the hodgepodge that many people believe it to be, it just comes from a heritage that's much further away in the PL family tree than they're used to.

There are something things which were grafted on to S/R later on. For instance the S4 OOP system was added much later (in S4) and was based on Dylan's OOP system. So there's a case where the GP is correct that it was taking structure from another PL but it's also one which is fairly foreign to a lot of OOP devs

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