Very nice, but instead of an owl, shouldn't the cover illustration be a pirate?
Totally agree. R is pure pirate energy. Half the functions are hidden on purpose, the other half only work if you chant the right incantation while facing the CRAN mirror at dawn.
If you started with SAS for statistics like I did, you'd see how absolutely civilized R is in comparison.
Yes but today I find little to no benefit over python
no plotting library available in python even comes close to ggplot2. just to give one major example. another would be the vast amount of statistics solutions. but ... python is good enough for everything and more - so, it doesn't really feel worth maintaining two separate code bases and R is lacking in too many areas for it to compete with python for most applications.
Plotting is one task I find such huge benefits to AI coding assistants. I can ask "make a plot with such and such data, one line per <blank>" etc. Since its so east to validate the code (just run the program and look at the plots) iterations are super easy