# R programming language

35 Hacker News commenters recommended R programming language and 12 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for statistics and data analysis, with Lisp-like design. Critics cite quirky design, silent errors, and a steep setup learning curve.

## Why people recommend it

- Great for statistics and data (7 comments): "It's a lovely language for cleaning and analyzing data, and the core development team keeps making improvements." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161302)) "R's the best, bc it's been a statistical analysis language from the beginning in 1974" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052373)) "If you primarily care about statistical modeling, then R still wins (easily)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49347389))
- Expressive Lisp-inspired design (4 comments): "The R language is just so much more beautiful than Python, in its full lispy goodness, with lazy evaluation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48651323)) "a much more human legible syntax that doesn’t require huge numbers of nested parentheses" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139734)) "R is overtly and heavily inspired by Lisp which was a big deal in AI at one point." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46057527))
- Strong people and community behind it (2 comments): "R is so good in part because of the efforts of people like Di Cook, Hadley Wickham, and Yihui Xie" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46048943)) "I love R and the various things people do with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518067))

## What people warn about

- Quirky, inconsistent language design (4 comments): "Even established packages have bugs caused by R weirdness." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46056089)) "R is tricky in that regard since it feels like a mix of OOP and DOP variants" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48659121)) "R is simply badly designed as a programming language." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46103793))
- Silent wrong results and bad defaults (2 comments): "In my experience R is king of happily chugging along spitting out nonsense results when it should have errored 100 lines ago." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46056265)) "The language itself is also very simple and has defaults that people don't even bother changing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48660110))
- Slow, loop-heavy code (2 comments): "I'd actually see this as a disadvantage of R because you suddenly have to jump through loops" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46056078)) "It would be the slowest language result on the list." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843042))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend
- [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend
- [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend
- [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend
- [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "R programming language", https://hackerapproved.com/p/r-programming-language/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).