I too am a Tidyverse shill. Hadley Wickham truly did an amazing job designing the whole ecosystem and API. I personally haven't encountered another API that has given me the same feeling of mastery and empowerment - just the correct blend of expressiveness, cohesion and ease of use.
Of course this is partly attributed to R's great DSL capabilities and making documentation first class. But I've definitely seen terrible APIs in R too.
Wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with another ecosystem? (Regarding API design)
On the async part, definitely worth checking out https://github.com/shikokuchuo/mirai, also integrates nicely with Shiny/plumber
It's the language I'm most proficient in. Tidyverse is the most human-friendly way for explorational data analysis. Data.Table is blazing fast. RStudio is the best IDE I've ever seen and so tightly coupled with the mostly amazing documentation that it's a pure delight. CRAN's quality control next to none.
That being said, I prefer Python for my production use cases.
Why? What's missing in R, imho, is:
a) a decent interface to the web.
b) a decent way to use async processing / utilise the CPU fully.
I've found ways around both, but compare `Shiny` to `FastApi` + `Jinja2` and `future` to `asyncio`.
Shiny just feels clunky, no matter what you do. And R `future` (which saved my butt in 2019 when I was processing millions of geospatial data points for a project, so not throwing any shade) can be a total mindfuck and bug out (at least back then).
(Man, I miss working more in R, though.)