It really is. Even for data analysis there are (apparently and hopefully) much better programs/languages (not sure what term would be correct here). I was actually assigned to an institude for computational biology to help me with the coding for my Master’s thesis but the people DID NOT USE R so they didn’t provide any help anyway. And I had to use R. They mostly used mathlab. Later, when I started working, Graphpad Prism absolutely did the job necessary. Most of the “coding” I used R for could have honestly just be done in Excel.
But the worst part of it is making it through and it completely doesn’t matter. Like, people who actually code for a living don’t care in the slightest about R. Just because I now have fought my way through it doesn’t mean it is anywhere useful to learn C or PHP or whatever, mostly because the field of use is so narrow and specific and not one of those “universal” languages (for lack of a better term) that you actually can build software and websites and apps with. I cannot code anything “for fun” even if I wanted to. I remember there was something HTML something in R, but come on. (Also I forgot what HTML is.) This is not what it is used for and it gives me nothing. While my spouse, who is a software developer with the patience of a saint when it comes to my stupid questions, used his knowledge of python to learn Rust and then play around with C and now Go and even go to a conference about Go and actually understand whats going on there. There seem to be much more crosslinks and transferring going on and also a similar usefulness.
Please excuse the R-rant/R-rage, I am really frustrated about it because I went in with the best intentions and I wasted a year on this bullshit and it doesn’t even make my CV look good.