That's unfair to to the pig. I mean, unfair to Perl. In the past I've done lots of programming in Perl, and am currently doing lots of programming in R. I wo

That's unfair to to the pig. I mean, unfair to Perl. In the past I've done lots of programming in Perl, and am currently doing lots of programming in R. I would say without reservation that Perl is a much better designed language, with good documentation, and a coherent philosophy. Perl has some issues, but has a solid core. R has some nice individual packages, and some bright people involved, but the core is rotten. While it is possible to write high performance R, and possible to write easy-to-read R, I don't think it's possible to do both at the same time. It's easy to drop to C or C++ to speed up the critical sections, but often the glue between the pieces is so slow that it's not worth bothering. I'm not recommending that you use Perl for statistics (Python or Julia would be better choices), but I think a language written by a linguist for sysadmins is a much better choice than a language written by statisticians for statisticians. Although maybe that's because I'm a programmer and not a statistician?