I think the point about interactivity is pretty well understood. Another comment in the thread pointed out how the majority of people who write R do it in RStud

I think the point about interactivity is pretty well understood. Another comment in the thread pointed out how the majority of people who write R do it in RStudio and RStudio's defaults push an interactive workflow on the users (the nature of the work you do has a similar effect). So even for someone very new to the language it's pretty obvious.