> Of course you can. There's packages, with excellent software engineering structure, that are designed to include documentation and tests.
For me, the problem with R is that the language is inconsistent.
Many packages arose to address many problems, but they all feel like a hack on top of the core language.
Take the whole Tidyverse; it just does dataframes from R core but then from the ground up.
Now, users can choose between the core language dataframes and the Tidyverse dataframes.
Same holds for plotting.
The core issue, I think, is that the core language misses some essential features which other languages do have nowadays.
For example, a type system.
In R, since types are missing, everything is a table (dataframe) which I find just weird.
> It's not cobbled together like JavaScript or bash.
But also not as good as my favorite: Julia.
Comparing it to Bash is like saying that its better than COBOL.
We all know Bash is quite old, but for certain situations it just works.
The tidyverse is the benefit and the curse of metaprogramming, something that R takes from lisp, and something that has cursed (helped?) C++ since it was added.
As far as type systems, there's really two different types of "types": individual types objects that can have generic functions attached to them, etc. This is not as well known, and there are actually several object systems for typing:
But these sort of objects are not quite as commonly created by programmers, because the second type of "types" are much more useful: data frames, which is kind of a vectorization of structs. This is what would be used in data oriented design, which is apparently much more common in modern game design.
For me, the problem with R is that the language is inconsistent. Many packages arose to address many problems, but they all feel like a hack on top of the core language. Take the whole Tidyverse; it just does dataframes from R core but then from the ground up. Now, users can choose between the core language dataframes and the Tidyverse dataframes. Same holds for plotting. The core issue, I think, is that the core language misses some essential features which other languages do have nowadays. For example, a type system. In R, since types are missing, everything is a table (dataframe) which I find just weird.
> It's not cobbled together like JavaScript or bash.
But also not as good as my favorite: Julia. Comparing it to Bash is like saying that its better than COBOL. We all know Bash is quite old, but for certain situations it just works.