I believe it has been one of the intentions for a while. How far it has advanced, I'm not sure, I haven't looked at it for almost a year, now time for a refresher. But R may be a bit tricky to compete with directly at this point: it has been designed as a statistical language from the ground up, and it would be a while for any language to catch up to R's library.
But, I still see many people doing statistical computations in Matlab, and that can not be very hard to beat, especially how similar the syntax is, and how ugly Matlab is at statistics (from what I am reading in the comments here, vectorization still carries a performance penalty though, which is a real pity).
Just curious -- what patterns bothered you the most with R btw?
> Just curious -- what patterns bothered you the most with R btw?
It's mostly around the multitude of subtly different types and the ways you convert between them. I think I also remember strange things like lists having named attributes in addition to list members that just seemed totally wrong and confusing to me.
I wish I could give you better specifics but it's been several years since I've done anything with R.
Just curious -- what patterns bothered you the most with R btw?