Is R still a good language to learn in 2022? (2024)

Welcome back! R is an awesome programming language that’s used heavily in data science, I’ve personally used R for several years now, but with the exploding popularity of other languages like Python, should you still learn R? In my opinion, absolutely yes! This is still an awesome programming language to learn, and if you’re planning on becoming a data scientist, having R in your arsenal of programming languages could lead you to qualify for more positons. If that’s not enough, here are a few other reasons why R is still worth learning in 2022!

One of the biggest features about R is that you have more capability than just processing data, you can actually build out front ends of your data applications. By using a package like RShiny you can actually build a GUI within R, check out the link below to learn more:

I’ve personally built several different GUI’s with this package and it’s definitely worth picking up!

Next up we have the community, there are a ton of people using R, because of this, there is a massive community behind this language. Because of this, we get a ton of documents, tutorials and troubleshooting posts that make learning and maintaining R a pleasant experience. Without a doubt the community of R is one of the best things about this language.

Another very awesome feature about R is the fact that it’s free and open source, this allows you to build out projects with very little startup cost. On top of this, packages are being created every single day, this allows you to utilize these different types of packages for your projects! This is without a doubt another awesome reason to learn R!

Next up, R has some of the best graphing packages out there, if you plan on creating visualizations for your data, R is definitely a solid language to do…