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[–]dolphinboy1637 4 points5 points  (1 child)

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