The R language offers beautiful ways to do statistics; Clojure has charming ways to work with data. What happens when they meet?

Each holds its own opinionated vision towards functional programming, Lisp, metaprogramming, data driven programming and interactive workflow. Can they have some common ground to reason about these ideas together?

It turns out that interop may bring some joy on both parties: For R users, Clojure allows for elegant, powerful ways to process data and to access JVM libraries; for Clojurians, R opens a huge collection of libraries and tools for statistical computing and data visualization. When used wisely, interop could potentially be transformative for both cultures: R may learn something about Simple; Clojure may learn something about Easy.

In the talk we will review old ways, as well as a new library, for R-Clojure interop. We will demonstrate some of its uses and potentials, and discuss several of the conceptual challenges that arise.

We will argue, that R could be an important ally on Clojure's quest to become a great platform for data science.