To add: in my experience, programmers who denigrate R think of it as a software engineering language. Not all programming languages are meant to be languages fo

To add: in my experience, programmers who denigrate R think of it as a software engineering language. Not all programming languages are meant to be languages for building large scale applications. Programming is not just about building business applications, it's about getting a computer to do things. And R excels at doing statistics and data science. If you keep that mindset, I believe many will find that its an excellent programming language.