R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)
My own personal rant, I think the specific feeling I get is the conceptual idea of R has long since outpaced the reality of R.<p>People like to fetishize data, and R sure lets you do that. The data science landscape however is growing such that R is really just a one-trick pony, however, that one trick is for better or worse being the gold standard of statistics and modeling, somehow.<p>But everything else wants to sugar coat the software surrounding the statistics, and leaves you no room to grow.<p>This is a very bad over-simplified example, but you sort of can&#x27;t learn much about graphic design or good communication skills by using ggplot2 ... you can make something look very very nice, hopefully, in the general case, sure. And you can definitely do all kinds of hacks and crazy code to make it do whatever you want, but by doing that you produce ever more fragile and environment dependent code. You&#x27;d be better off learning just about anything else for graphics (Straight SVG, D3, Processing, Cairo directly, etc) because it is of course a bit more of a problem starting up, but a generalized skill set that could allow you to grow.<p>You also learn pretty much nothing about web development from Shiny. Shiny is a wonderful idea, but ultimately prevents a statistician from implementing what it promises, which is an analytic application. At some point, you have to ditch it and learn more traditional web stacks. It is also something of a sales funnel into a server solution that&#x27;s a DDOS or security nightmare just waiting to happen.<p>So instead of just griping, I guess I have some ideas... it would be nice to have a Ruby&#x2F;JS&#x2F;Java&#x2F;Python service generator. It would be nice to have a D3&#x2F;React&#x2F;whatver based  generator. It would be nice for there to be a data munging solution (or even whole models, more like more PMML type stuff) that can be generalized into something that could be compiled or generates Python&#x2F;Java&#x2F;Bash&#x2F;JS&#x2F;Whatever code.<p>Ultimately you start thinking along those lines, and you realize that the promises R is making about empowering the analyst are just teasing them rather than helping.<p>R could do with less magic and more concentration on being simply a great statistics engine that integrates better. I guess it is that to some degree, but it sure fails the rest of the technology world that tries to live with it.