> I learned about closures, higher order functions, OOP, testing and interacting with API's from it, and it definitely gave me insight into how computers worked

> I learned about closures, higher order functions, OOP, testing and interacting with API's from it, and it definitely gave me insight into how computers worked. Well done, I'm honestly impressed :D > remember that it's a 90's era clone of a 70's era language That's not an excuse. Lisp is two decades older. > I find your disdain for R a little annoying ... I'm sorry that you have to deal with horrible legacy R code This has nothing to do with legacy code - I rarely have to touch that. (Scientific code is rarely reused...). R does offer a lot of great features, I'll grant you that. It has a huge library with great functions for doing statistical analysis and really neat graphics - exactly what it was designed for. As a biologist, I cannot imagine not using it. But, and this is a big but, as a programming language it is absolutely horrible. I've worked with half a dozen languages, and none of them are anywhere near as big a pain in the backside as R. Most of that has to do with the terrible incongruity of a plethora of mutually-incompatible data types. You know, you have one function that will only work on a data frame, but somehow your data ended up as a list; or you want strings or numbers but have factors; that kind of thing. In no other language do I have to do as much googling while coding, because even basic operations are so willy-nilly idiosyncratic in their details that I keep forgetting how to do them properly. The "tidyverse" and related packages do a lot to make the experience less painful, but pure R remains a linguistic nightmare.