> This is the very same critic that was (and still is) made about perl.
It's funny how similar the arguments are.
They can both be described as a language with some serious gotchas, but that's simple enough and has such a great package collection that it's easy to get a lot of things done very quickly.
Perl is a language that pursued extreme flexibility and programming-style agnosticism as a design goal...that made it less than ideal for large scale software engineering...but enabled a lot of experimentation with powerful, sometimes sweet and expressive and sometimes obfuscated idioms.
R is a bit of a train wreck. It makes hard things easy (if you know the right library or idiom), but often makes easy things hard.
Perl is the duct tape of languages, R is more like the A-10 Warthog, ugly but powerful for a specific job.
It's funny how similar the arguments are.
They can both be described as a language with some serious gotchas, but that's simple enough and has such a great package collection that it's easy to get a lot of things done very quickly.
That description could also fit Javascript.