That&#x27;s unfair to to the pig.  I mean, unfair to Perl.  In the past I&#x27;ve done lots of programming in Perl, and am currently doing lots of programming in R.  I would say without reservation that Perl is a much better designed language, with good documentation, and a coherent philosophy. Perl has some issues, but has a solid core.<p>R has some nice individual packages, and some bright people involved, but the core is rotten.  While it is possible to write high performance R, and possible to write easy-to-read R, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s possible to do both at the same time.  It&#x27;s easy to drop to C or C++ to speed up the critical sections, but often the glue between the pieces is so slow that it&#x27;s not worth bothering.<p>I&#x27;m not recommending that you use Perl for statistics (Python or Julia would be better choices), but I think a language written by a linguist for sysadmins is a much better choice than a language written by statisticians for statisticians.  Although maybe that&#x27;s because I&#x27;m a programmer and not a statistician?