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The Power of the R Programming Language
BartlebyScrivener writes "The New York Times has an article on the R programming language. The Times describes it as: 'a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.'"
I wish it had a more googleable name. It's hard to search for help. The signal to noise ratio is low.
I use LabView on a daily basis. I hate it.
My coworkers like it and what they seem to have in common is that they either don't know any other languages or aren't proficient in them.
It is a language that aims to be very simple by removing as much typed code as possible. Because of this you will spend stupid amounts of time moving little wires around and trying to make your code not look like a tangled mess. And good luck changing it later.
Since there are no functions and the only way to reuse code is to put it in a different file people tend not to do this. So if you want to use part of someone else's code you will usually have to copy and paste into a different file and spend a bunch of time reconnecting wires and dealing with references to variables you won't have access to in the new file.
The visual style is also, in my opinion, much harder to read than typed code. If I'm trying to figure out some sort of formula it's easier to read it as text than try to figure out where all these wires are coming from that are connected to little "+" and "-" terminals. Also, since comments take space they tend to be short and are usually missing in more complicated sections because it's harder to route the wires around them. And control structures quickly make code virtually unreadable.
There's also the part about writing most of your code with a mouse. Do you really enjoy having to navigate through a series of menus to do anything?
It has plenty of other annoying behaviors.
If you try to access an array element out of range it just gives you the default value for that data type rather than giving some indication that something is wrong.
There is an option to automatically build an array as the output of a loop, but no way to make it *not* add a value to the array. Like when you hit a terminating condition for the loop or some value you want to skip. If you have these situations you either have to modify the array afterwards or build the array manually.