Why might someone say R is NOT a programming language? [closed]

Posted by Tal Galili on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Tal Galili
Published on 2010-04-25T10:38:20Z Indexed on 2010/04/25 17:33 UTC
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programming-languages

I came by the following comment today on twitter "R is not a programming language, it's a statistics package with the GUI missing."

And I am wondering -

Why not? What is "missing" in R to make it a "programming language" ?

Update: For the protocol, I am a big fan of R, use it daily, and support it's existence.
I now changed the name of this thread from "Why is R NOT a programming language?" to "Why might someone say R is NOT a programming language?" Which better reflects my motivation for this thread (which is, to know if R has any programmatical disadvantages that I might have not heard about).

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