I see a lot of R is very hard to reproduce use Python, or R is hardly a programming language, and I honestly have to wonder if this is really written in good fa

I see a lot of R is very hard to reproduce use Python, or R is hardly a programming language, and I honestly have to wonder if this is really written in good faith, and on a forum that's supposedly a bastion of Scheme love, no less. R is far more of a Lisp than Python, and in a field that heavily relies on DSL abstractions (which definitely includes clinical laboratories), R is going to fight you a lot less than most choices. In regards to packaging, you have MRAN snapshots, you have conda (which will give you binaries on Linux), you have renv, roughly in order of preference. The situation is not ideal, but it's certainly not worse than Python, this is not a hill I'd die on! Julia might be an exciting and welcome alternative to both; from where I'm sitting, it hardly even enters the conversation currently (in data science where I'm at, it's all Python and R, with Python unfortunately taking by far the larger slice of the pie), but I wish it a bright future, it's a great language.