R Programming By Example

What R is not good for

No programming language or system is perfect. R certainly has a number of drawbacks, the most common being that it can be painfully slow (when not used correctly). Keep in mind that R is essentially based on 40-year-old technology, going back to the original S system developed at Bell Labs. Therefore, several of its imperfections come from the fact that it was not built in anticipation for the data age we live in now. When R was born, disk and RAM were very expensive and the internet was just getting started. Notions of large-scale data analysis and high-performance computing were rare.

Fast-forward to the present, hardware cost is just a fraction of what it used to be, computing power is available online for pennies, ...