I love R. R was the first programming language I’ve ever learned in depth, it was the first programming language that I fell in love with. The first programming language where I would often stop what I was doing and look up a particular syntax, or try to figure out how paradigms common in other languages could be migrated over. It was the first programming language where I felt frustrated and lonely I had no one to work with, and later where I felt so thankful I had people to work with. The first language where I learned in isolation, the first language where I learned in community with others, the first language where I enthusiastically taught others.
I love R’s orientation. Is it a statistical programming language, as the official CRAN header (“The R Project for Statistical Computing”) might suggest? Or as a subheading describes, is it a software environment for statistical computing and graphics? Or is R a general programming language, just as useful for a production-ready web app as any other language (as Joe Cheng has argued)? The answer is yes. R is those things. R has some obvious intentions and scopes, but using R on a day-to-day basis forces us to look past the supposed “intended scopes” and redefine them for ourselves.
I love R’s syntax. R being dynamically typed, has <- in
addition to = for variable assignment, no variable
declaration keywords, runs through a live console instead of
through compilation or through reloading through a browser
(see: JS), and so on. These might be points of criticism for
instability and just plain oddity. But I think these
features make them easier for new programmers to learn. We
don’t have to worry about types or declarations, and the
arrow <- implies a flow of data into a variable. For new
learners, these features let you write immediately.
I love R’s resources. Most of all the help command ? is
better than any other — way better than the Unix man pages,
than MDN or W3 web docs, than any RFC online could explain.
The single common interface, requiring examples for
contributed functions, and including support for vignettes
and links between docs. Only a language that loves its users
would provide this. And R, I love you too.
But most of all, dwarfing everything else I love about R, I love the community that embraces and supports R. R is what we can have if programming were democratic and open. Supported by wonderful people who are concerned about being friendly and welcoming to new R users, supported by tireless volunteers patching and updating code, supported by the ambitions of those that take R further. Far more than any other language I have ever experienced, R has teachers for non-programmers, companies like RStudio that value just and good ways to do work. RStudio even incorporates that belief in the public good into the structure and content of their charter. R has people that support the language and others that want to learn it. R is what we can have if we support each other.