Contrary to what I sometimes like to believe, there are other computer programming languages than just R. R, and languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby, are considered high-level languages, because they offer a greater level of abstraction from computer representations and resource management than the lower-level languages. For example, in some lower-level languages, you must specify the data type of the variables you create and manage the allocation of RAM manually - C, C++, and Fortran are of this type.
The high level of abstraction R provides allows us to do amazing things very quickly, such as import a data set, run a linear model, and plot the data and regression line in no more than four lines of code! On the other hand, nothing quite beats the performance of carefully crafted lower-level code. Even so, it would take hundreds of lines of code to run a linear model...
