Why R?

OK, R is great. It has two incredible virtues:

1. it is not SAS,
2. it is not Splus,

and I’ll forgive it much for those. And it is a half-decent programming language with a respectable heritage.

But

• stringsAsFactors ?
• the database API ?
• a core development team that seems actively hostile to the idea of unit tests ?

are all minuses.

But the big issue is approximately 90% of CRAN, which seems to be made up of that which someone has written as their first undergraduate exercise in coding. 500 line functions, 30 parameter APIs, etc. Who would do that?

And please spare me from the packages that have taken it upon themselves to rewrite linear algebra routines in their own C code because it was too hard to Read The Fine Manual.