I caught some flak on Twitter a few weeks back for my comment in aRrgh that R's community "contains, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers." An interlocutor named several people -- who were presumably important to R in some way; I don't know the pantheon and didn't check -- and noted that one had won an ACM award.

I don't think software engineers win ACM awards!

Which gets, I think, at some of the differences in the values held by practitioners of computer science and software engineers (and reminds me of my old professor Allen Downey's assertion that engineering is a bit of a "disreputable" field). The R community isn't bad and of course isn't stupid; a lot of bright people have worked on R. But computer scientists and mathematicians on the one hand and software engineers on the other look for the devil in different sets of details, and I assert the latter set is pretty heavily bedeviled!