I'm writing this as a heavy python user in my day job. Python is terrible for writing complex systems in. Both the language and the libraries are full of footguns for the novice and expert alike. It has 20 years of baggage, the packaging and environment handling is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster, although uv seems to be a minor light at the end of the tunnel. It is not a simple language at this point. It has had so many features tacked on, that it needs years of use to have a solid understanding of all the interactions.
Python is a language that became successful not because it was the best in it's class, but because it was the least bad. It became the lingua franca of quantitative analysis, because R was even worse and matlab was a closed ecosystem with strong whiffs of the 80s. It became successful because it was the least bad glue language for getting up and running with ML and later on LLMs.
In comparison, Rust is a very predictable and robust language. The tradeoff it makes is that it buys safety for the price of higher upfront complexity. I'd never use Rust to do research in. It'd be an exercise in frustration. However, for writing reliable and robust systems, it's the least bad currently.
What's wrong with R? I used it and liked it in undergrad. I certainly didn't use it as seriously as the users who made Python popular, but to this day I remember R fondly and would never choose Python for a personal project.
My R use was self-taught, as well. I refused to use proprietary software for school all through high school and university, so I used R where we were expected to use Excel or MatLab (though I usually used GNU Octave for the latter), including for at least one or two math classes. I don't remember anything being tricky or difficult to work with.
R is the most haphazard programming environment I've ever used. It feels like an agglomeration of hundreds of different people's shell aliases and scripting one-liners.
I'll grant my only exposure has been a two- or three-day "Intro to R" class but I ran screaming from that experience and have never touched it again.
It maybe worked against me that I am a programmer, not a statistician or researcher.
When I used it I was a computer science student. But I wasn't reading anyone else's code or trying to maintain anything complex, which is why I asked what I did. I'm sure there are quirks I never had to deal with.
So is it just that the stdlib is really big and messy?
Python is a language that became successful not because it was the best in it's class, but because it was the least bad. It became the lingua franca of quantitative analysis, because R was even worse and matlab was a closed ecosystem with strong whiffs of the 80s. It became successful because it was the least bad glue language for getting up and running with ML and later on LLMs.
In comparison, Rust is a very predictable and robust language. The tradeoff it makes is that it buys safety for the price of higher upfront complexity. I'd never use Rust to do research in. It'd be an exercise in frustration. However, for writing reliable and robust systems, it's the least bad currently.