> How likely is it that R packages, written by specialists (or grad students) whose main focus is often not programming but some other discipline, in a language

> How likely is it that R packages, written by specialists (or grad students) whose main focus is often not programming but some other discipline, in a language full of "quirks," are going to be really reliable? Do you have the data to back that up or is just a question that you don't have an answer to? I think the statement brush off the high quality R packages that already in the ecosystem that is not in anywhere else. The author of element of statistic learning created glmnet package which took python years to even have ported. There are many other packages out there that Python does not have. I am not going to argue it's the prettiest language. But there are tons of packages and many found no where else in other language ecosystem. If you're going to say just use rest/rpc then it just defeat the purpose of your initial argument. And just look at springer or, gosh the other publisher escaped my mind right now, but these publishers have book on statistical subjects with R packages accompany the book. It may be ugly but the packages are maintain by expert in the field of statistic and they may not be programmer. But they do dog food their package and use dataset to see the results. Likewise just read up on the Ranger Rpackage paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.04409.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.04409.pdf). They test their output with the other randomforest package. And it's silly to point this argument at just R when the same happen to Python. The bootstrap function in SciKit-Learn for the longest time didn't even really do bootstrap. The linear regression function automatically does shrinkage with no option to turn off. No language is perfect. But I believe R have a place and especially in statistic. Many many wonderful expert statistician are maintain and creating R packages (eg Dr. Frank E. Harrell Jr. ) Many R packages have accompanying paper publish here https://www.jstatsoft.org/index https://www.jstatsoft.org/index