> As someone who basically uses R as a nice LISP-y scripting language to orchestrate calling low-level compiled code from other languages
When I read this, I think, would `bash` or something equally portable/universally installed work?
R is a beautiful thing when limited to its core uses But in my experience, the more we build away from those core uses, the more brittleness we introduce. I wish the Posit team would focus on the core R experience, resolve some of the hundreds of open issues on its core packages in a timely way [0,1], and just generally play to R's strengths.
The only meaningful alternative I see is Python with maybe Polars or DuckDB.
Except... this is exactly was R was created to do, with a focus on mathematical/statistical libraries written in things like FORTRAN.
R is great as a glue language for these purposes if the purpose of calling that low-level compiled code is largely to work with data and especially if that data is not so large/computationally intensive to work with that it does not need to be distributed across hardware.
https://github.com/posit-dev/positron (Elastic V2)
