I really like R, I find it a useful tool for both my personal data work and mapping along with the things I do professionally as the Data Services director for Assembly. RStudio is a nice simple IDE, it works and works well. But I have this nagging suspicion that R is not a real programming language, that it has no future, and only people who really use R for much of anything useful are academics.

I know that’s a lie, mostly told by fan boys of Python. There are tons of packages for R and new ones keep being written, and it’s a widely used language for data science. I’ve used Python, sometimes that’s the only tool for the job, but it’s really not my favorite language. I just don’t like the use of spaces and line breaks for flow control. I would much rather have more freedom to lay out my code as I see as readable and logical, how I see things and matches my work flow. I learned Python originally for writing QGIS plugins to supplement making maps for the blog, and then I learned PANDAS 1.0 which was an awesome tool for processing data, until I discovered R and the tidyverse.

I am trying to do more coding with C and Rust. And learning a bit of Java and other languages. I want to be fluent in as many programming languages and pick up skills that I can quickly transfer to whatever is the fashionable language of the day. As many of the newer programming concepts make programming faster and better. Plus I want to have marketable skills, which I am not sure if the R programming language really counts as a marketable skill. Yes, I do awesome data work with it, filtering and processing millions of records each day with it, but I hardly find it to be professional solution that is used by leading tech people for such purposes.