I think a lot of the problem with comparing R to other languages is that a lot people don't get the problem space that R is working in. Science deals a lot wit

I think a lot of the problem with comparing R to other languages is that a lot people don't get the problem space that R is working in. Science deals a lot with categorical variables, missing data and high dimensional data, and the 'table' or 'dataframe' is adept at storing and working with this information. Under the hood it's just a load of optimised fortran code working matrices, but the code clearly shows what kinds of data manipulations and transformation you are doing to eek the right information and visualisations out from the dataset. I see problems when people take an imperative approach to solving numerical problems, and something like Python is better suited to that. Also, R isn't really set up to work with matrices like Matlab/Julia are.