Hacker News Reader

The whole R sucks as a language thing is getting pretty old. There is some things that R is really good at, there are some things that Python is really good at. Just because R comes from a somewhat unusual ancestry (firmly rooted in functional programming with immutable data structures and generic function style OO) doesn't make it bad.

View on HN

As recently as a few months ago, R used a form of "reference counting" which only allowed three values in the counter: 0, 1, and 2 [1]. This might be caused by unusual ancestry or it might not, but it's hard to stop saying R sucks when it does that in 2014.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/25384396/4323

It still does that. But it's an optimization for editing in place, not related to gc

Actually having lots of people complain about a programming language is a good indicator for that language doing well:

- JavaScript

- PHP

- C++

- ...

On that note, Hadley, R IS awesome and a large reason for that is your contribution to it! Thanks and keep up the good work!

Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com