R is a joy if you treat it like Awk
"R is only great if your data is already great."<p>Disagree. R has an incredible ecosystem for parsing, cleaning, and manipulating data. Even ignoring the tidyverse, base R provides more than enough functionality to clean and analyze data--you just need to spend some time learning it. If you use the tidyverse, it's even easier. The only other ecosystem that comes close to R is Julia, which was designed taking many of the best parts of R into consideration.