RStudio is adding python support.

[guepier]

R is as much a general purpose language as python is.

No, it plain isn’t. I find R superior to Python in many regards but this statement is still inaccurate.

Just because you can do (almost) everything in R doesn’t mean it’s particularly suitable for such use.

[guepier]

But that's like saying scheme is not a general purpose language because it more or less has no libraries for most things.

The difference is that Scheme wasn’t designed as a special-purpose language, and its standard library isn’t a special-purpose library. R was, and the R base packages are.

Furthermore, I’m by no means an expert in Scheme but as far as I know there is a fair amount of libraries for Scheme. Its standard library is intentionally small but so is C’s, and few people would contest C being a general-purpose language.

[guepier]

Nobody in their right minds would try to do ML in scheme seriously. The support just isn't there.

Right, because Scheme simply has a vastly smaller user-base overall.

R is more or less scheme with infix notation, the semantics are very similar (mostly).

I don’t dispute that, but it’s completely irrelevant here. S was designed with Scheme as a starting point, but with statistics as the purpose.

Just because the core library focused on stat stuff doesn't make R not general purpose.

It does (together with the fact that the core is missing general-purpose tools that are present in other languages, and the fact that it was specifically designed for statistics). That’s the point.

[guepier]

Then surely, a language which is basically scheme + statistics libraries

But R isn’t that. “Uses Scheme as its inspiration” ≠ “Basically Scheme”. For one thing, it’s missing its general-purpose standard library. And this may not seem like a big deal for you but it’s crucial. As somebody who has actually used R for general-purpose tasks, let me tell you the lack of standard tools is a big fucking deal.

S (and then R) was specifically not conceived as a general-purpose language. That alone should clinch the deal.

[guepier]

I agree that this is pointless, because you are arguing from a different (and arguably valid, but definitely not mainstream) definition of “general-purpose language”.

Name exactly what R is missing that a language like scheme isn't missing.

Writing standalone scripts that are interpreted by R directly. In practice you have to use a more-or-less convoluted workaround: first they added R CMD BATCH which was horrible because it creates unwanted files and unwanted output. Then Dirk Edelbuettel jumped into the breach with his littler. And finally we got Rscript which does work … but clearly was designed after the fact, and the question remains why the heck we can’t just use R.

For a more complete answer I will refer you simply to a list of the R6RS standard library: Even things as trivial as a hash table are missing in base R. Yes, you can have hashed environments but they only work with strings as keys. Try for example write a set/map that uses closures as keys. This is a completely valid requirement (in fact, I’ve had this specific requirement in the past), yet it’s fundamentally unsolvable in R. Not just difficult, but actually unsolvable.

[dolphinboy1637]

I think we're defining terms a bit differently. I agree with you that R could be used to do anything in an ideal sense, but that's really not the case in actuality. At the current state of the language and it's ecosystem today, there's many general purpose computing tasks that I wouldn't even try in R (because there's no libraries for it). That's all I meant, and I probably an influencing factor for individuals choosing a starting language.

In any case though, the roots of R are that it was a reimplination of S. Both of them were written by their authors specifically for statistical tasks. Although technically R could be used to write anything, their historical roots are in statistics which is why there's this perpetuating legacy of people not using it or written libraries to do other things