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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.

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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.

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