R works really remarkably well and clearly for folks who work in this domain day to day. It's easier to learn than a lot of other languages for people who are c

R works really remarkably well and clearly for folks who work in this domain day to day. It's easier to learn than a lot of other languages for people who are coming from subject knowledge and need to program to implement that knowledge. It may be a terrible language by some objective external computer science criteria. But as a domain specific language, that's not really important. What is important is that the domain specific aspect works well for people with domain knowledge. It's not the right tool for every job or every person, but it's incredibly expressive for people working with a specific set of problems.