Interesting. What features of R did you particularly dislike, and what was your background before then? I'm asking because S-PLUS (subsequently mostly replaced

Interesting. What features of R did you particularly dislike, and what was your background before then? I'm asking because S-PLUS (subsequently mostly replaced by R) was one of the first statistical languages I learned, and I have learned and actively used many other languages since, but I never before (or after) had this feeling that "this is the most convenient language in existence, and it does everything precisely the way I want and expect". I don't know Ruby (the snippets I've seen do look very nice, but it's mostly used in a very different domain), but Python does not come anywhere close (e.g. compare the treatment of defaul parameter values!), nor does Matlab (one function per file? wtf?), or C++, or Gauss, or really anything reasonably high level that I can think of. SAS and Stata might have a slight edge over R in very specific use cases, but outside of those, there is absolutely no comparison. Julia has a lot of potential, but imo it's not quite there yet. Also, R is ridiculously easy to incorporate C/C++/Fortran/etc. code into, and S3 is a really wonderful OOP/abstraction system. It's definitely not perfect, and today R does not quite evoke the same sentiment as S+ did back ~15 years ago, as R did away with some of my favorite S features and introduced a lot of complexity (although, it's also possible that my typical use cases became more complex, so I have to deal with internals more often). Also there are features like the apply() family of functions that I've seen done better, and some R features apparently make it hard to optimize code. But there is very little in the language that I could honestly say I seriously dislike.