[CreRecombinase]

R was heavily inspired by scheme, and I think that's a big part of why it's so popular in the scientific community (it's a great language for authoring DSLs). In fact, DSLs are so good in R that lots of midwit CS bros love to dunk on R the language, not realizing that what they're complaining about is in fact some library function. I like to tell people that R is "scheme on the streets, FORTRAN in the sheets". Just like Clojure deviated from I think R was very much developed as a Lisp designed to facilitate complex and flexible scientific applications (with an emphasis on statistical computing). I think you could develop a compelling analogy that Clojure:JVM::R:Numerics-oriented C/FORTRAN

[wrycoder]

From TFA, ...the creator of the R programming language, Ross Ihaka, who provided benchmarks demonstrating that Lisp’s optional type declaration and machine-code compiler allow for code that is 380 times faster than R and 150 times faster than Python

[kazinator]

R is built on a Lisp-like run-time core, complete with symbols, and linked lists made of cons cells, etc.

[bitwize]

I had no idea R was so much like Julia in that regard. Makes me wonder if the Julia devs were just like, "What if R, but more general?"