I don't understand how people can loath R. If you take a functional approach, especially using pipes, dplyr and a split, apply, combine style, it is quite beautiful. Much nicer than trying to, say, divide a time period by an integer in Go.
> If you take a functional approach, especially using pipes, dplyr and a split, apply, combine style, it is quite beautiful
Sure, but what if you don't? Sometimes, this is the right way to do things, other times there are other approaches that are more natural/beautiful. In many cases, a loop with conditionals is much easier to understand.
I use a lot of R, and like many aspects of it. But the fact that `f(stop("Hi!"))` may or may not throw an error depending on the internals of `f` is a little maddening. (And there are tons of similar issues.)
However, even I must admit that it is incredibly good at what it was meant to do - analyse and display data. (And yes, the tidyverse is a huge improvement of the syntax, although it's telling that they basically reinvented the language to do so.)
As an ecological modeller, I create my actual simulation models in Julia, because it is a much, much better language for any real programming. But I still analyse the output in R.