Why do we use R rather than Excel?
This week I got a bit more familiar with R while adding it as a scripting language for a data IDE I&#x27;m working on (it already supported other languages).<p>It is a very hard language and community to get into! The documentation is very sparse. Library documentation is published as PDF (I guess?) and also very sparse. The default `print` behavior is pretty hard to understand. It&#x27;s 1-indexed and it took me a while to realize every time I think `array[1]` I should write `array[[1]]`. I can&#x27;t tell the difference between `&lt;-` and `=`.<p>My guess is that it was probably a great language at some point but is way behind other numeric scripting languages like Julia or Matlab in terms of community attention and language ergonomics.<p>I know it&#x27;s highly used but other than legacy reasons I&#x27;m not sure why you&#x27;d want to learn it over Julia.<p>I&#x27;m also curious to investigate how the aspects I&#x27;m critical of differ in Octave.<p>Edit: totally fair, 1-indexing shouldn&#x27;t have been a &quot;critique&quot;. Lots of languages do that.