It's important to keep this in mind though because R (or rather S) is primarily supposed to be used interactively. A prof of mine used to call the R REPL and then go on from there. He called an editor from the REPL, wrote source files from the REPL etc. Once you see someone working with R like that, you start seeing R as what it is.
The beautiful it is to be used interactively, it really takes a lot of practice to write reliable code that doesn't abort with some error now and then.
