I’ve been really enjoying it since 1.6 came out. A lot of the points you raise are perfectly valid, but the speed difference coming from R and python is real (s

I’ve been really enjoying it since 1.6 came out. A lot of the points you raise are perfectly valid, but the speed difference coming from R and python is real (so long as you’re writing computationally intensive programs and not scripts, for which it is a bad tool at the moment). There’s less friction to get performant code compared to writing supplemental functions in C++. Also, I have to disagree with the unicode issue. The target audience is heavily invested in latex, so typing things like \theta is natural. It also results in code which is more terse compared to writing out all the letters, and at least for me results in a somewhat lower cognitive overhead when implementing algorithms etc.