You do have the correct sentiment in that for actual code meant to be distributed to other human beings it's almost never a good idea to use it although I've seen use cases, particularly involving Tidyverse constructs, where it arguably makes sense.

I've used it. The overloading of the equals sign is something that has never made sense for assignment. (Seriously, it's hard to intentionally come up with dumber notation than x = x+1.) I do use -> sometimes. It's more natural to do the evaluation and then figure out where you're going to store the result (particularly when you're programming).

This is minor as these things go. Definitely not a big deal one way or the other.

The `<-` in R comes from the APL keyboard, and that glyph is an assignment in APL. It wasn't just some crazy invention from Ross & Robert or even John Chambers.

The same problem led early C (pre-K&R1) to change its compound assignment operators from "=op" to "op=". In early C, "x = -3" assigned the value -3 to x (as it does now), but "x=-3" meant "x = x - 3" (now written "x-=3").

The `:=` has been in use in other langs like MySQL

-Arguing that adding a feature is ok because "R does it" is comically wrong when one is acquainted with all of R's warts and superfluous stuff

-Not even the R world uses that feature either, so we have actual empirical evidence that it's not that helpful to developers.

It's fine to not like the feature–I don't know enough about its usecase to feel one way of another–but your comment felt unnecessarily negative without adding much to the discussion.

Knowing that R users have access to these syntax and choose not to use it is interesting to consider, but that was overshadowed by your first statement.