You're right and wrong: R is a disaster when you want to write programs as you would in a real programming language. R is an excellent choice for what it is use

You're right and wrong: R is a disaster when you want to write programs as you would in a real programming language. R is an excellent choice for what it is used most of the time by these people whose education/training isn't related to programming: interactive analysis of data and (maybe) writing prototypes.