Counterpoint: a lot of work in R is not "development" in the ordinary sense. The outcome is not a piece of maintainable code that needs to be built on later or be generally useful in any way other than copying an occasional snippet.
In some research fields (e.g. scientific fields that use R) the ground rules are that the code needs to be understandable and it needs to be clear that the libraries involved were used correctly. That's basically it. Even hardcoded directories are common. Good development practices are not widely understood to be important and in general many people are just starting to get the hang of version control and might not use it at all.
If R enables you to solve a statistical problem you have right now and it does this in a way that is better or more comprehensible for the people who use it, that means it has a niche. As someone with software development experience in a bunch of other languages, I agree with you that R is full of weird warts, but let's not forget that there are areas where its value is still obvious.
Citation: my partner works in a scientific field where R is predominant.
> I agree with you that R is full of weird warts, but let's not forget that there are areas where its value is still obvious.
For sure. As much frustration as I had with R, at the time it was an enormous improvement over the stuff that came before it. And its emergence and success led to other languages improving their data and analytics capabilities.
In some research fields (e.g. scientific fields that use R) the ground rules are that the code needs to be understandable and it needs to be clear that the libraries involved were used correctly. That's basically it. Even hardcoded directories are common. Good development practices are not widely understood to be important and in general many people are just starting to get the hang of version control and might not use it at all.
If R enables you to solve a statistical problem you have right now and it does this in a way that is better or more comprehensible for the people who use it, that means it has a niche. As someone with software development experience in a bunch of other languages, I agree with you that R is full of weird warts, but let's not forget that there are areas where its value is still obvious.
Citation: my partner works in a scientific field where R is predominant.