use Perl

Nothing surprising about this sort of thing. My iPhone can play some games, but it very often doesn't let me make or receive phone calls.

Congratulations!

"Like most modern programming languages, R is capable of performing a variety of tasks, but it specializes in powerful statistical analysis."

The target reader for this article has never heard of C or Perl, and probably not Java; doesn't know the phrase "Turing-complete"; doesn't think that Haskell is cool; doesn't know why one would choose one language over another.

What is this reader supposed to make of "by giving them access to various commands"? I guarantee that if I read that to my father, who is a smart man who has read the NYT for his whole life, he would not know what this means.

What does "helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks" mean? "Helps"?

It's unbearably bad. And I'm not saying from a geek standpoint--it's not that it glosses over some fine distinction that only we care about. It's bad from the standpoint of anyone trying to get information out of it.

"R is similar to other programming languages, like C, Java and Perl, in that it helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks by giving them access to various commands."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html

Oh. My. God. I just don't even know where to begin.

There was just a thread about this on the freebsd-user list:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2008-December/189389.html

I'm a longtime FreeBSD user and promoter, but it really blows me away that getting 5.10 into Ports wasn't done ages ago, that it isn't a really big priority. This state of affairs does not reflect well on the OS.