Ironically R inside is still much of a Lisp. > The truth is that the stampede began while R was still in a rough state, people were so eager to get away from L

Ironically R inside is still much of a Lisp. > The truth is that the stampede began while R was still in a rough state, people were so eager to get away from Lisp. That's not a big surprise. The syntax is/was an important reason. Most users of statistics / maths software prefer a more math-like notation. Even the bigger Lisp applications in the maths area provide that always: Macsyma/Maxima, Reduce, Axiom, Derive, .. One could have written that on top of Lisp, but it was much more convenient to develop a specialized language/runtime using C. C + Lisp + R would have been more complex than C + R.