CRAN is cool
Steve Martin 
CRAN is so cool. There are the, of course, the obvious reasons that have been said many times over the years. I particularly like this blog post as it effectively captures some of what makes CRAN (and R more generally) so unique. More recent additions to CRAN like every package automatically getting a DOI and html help pages (in addition to pdf) just add to the greatness. And CRAN’s uniqueness certainly stands out compared to PyPI as nicely summarized by Bruno Rodrigues.
One quirky feature of CRAN is that the website works great in a text-based web browser. Fire up Lynx and navigate to cran.r-project.org/package=data.table and it looks pretty similar to what you’d see with, say, Firefox.1
Try to do the same with PyPI and you’ll run into messages about accepting cookies and the lack of javascript. When I tried to navigate to pypi.org/project/pandas I didn’t get much.
This isn’t a criticism of PyPI or a suggestion to ditch a modern web browser—rather, it’s an observation about just how spartan and utilitarian CRAN can be. I personally like this minimalism as I can focus on what I care about (cool software) without needing to run a bunch of extra javascript and be served ads.
Footnotes
We can replace Lynx with Dillo and it all continues to hold.↩︎
Reuse
Citation
@online{martin2026,
author = {Martin, Steve},
title = {CRAN Is Cool},
date = {2026-09-25},
url = {https://marberts.github.io/blog/posts/2026/cran/},
langid = {en}
}