Degrees are better than radians, but usually they lead to more complications than using consistently only cycles as the unit of measure for angles (i.e. to plenty of unnecessary multiplications or divisions, the only advantage of degrees of being able to express exactly the angle of 30 degrees and its multiples is not worth in comparison with the disadvantages).

The use of radians introduces additional rounding errors that can be great at each trigonometric function evaluation, and it also wastes time. When the angles are measured in cycles, the reduction of the input range for the function arguments is done exactly and very fast (by just taking the fractional part), unlike with the case when angles are measured in radians.

The use of radians is useful only for certain problems that are solved symbolically with pen on paper, because the use of radians removes the proportionality constant from the integration and derivation formulae for trigonometric function. However this is a mistake, because those formulae are applied seldom, while the use of radians does not eliminate the proportionality constant (2*Pi), but it moves the constant into each function evaluation, with much worse overhead.

Because of this, even in the 19th century, when the use of radians became widespread for symbolic computations, whenever they did numeric computations, not symbolic, the same authors used sexagesimal degrees, not radians.

The use of radians with digital computers has always been a mistake, caused by people who have been taught in school to use radians, because there they were doing mostly symbolic computations, not numeric, and they have passed this habit to computer programs, without ever questioning whether this is the appropriate method for numeric computations.