In this talk, I will present the design and implementation of call-by-need in R, and a data-driven study of how generations of programmers have put laziness to use in their code. In our study, we analyze 16,707 R packages and observe the creation of 270.9 B promises. Our data suggest that there is little supporting evidence to assert that programmers use laziness to avoid unnecessary computation or to operate over infinite data structures. For the most part R code appears to have been written without reliance on and in many cases even knowledge of, delayed argument evaluation. The only significant exception is a small number of packages which leverage call-by-need for meta-programming. I will discuss how we intend to leverage these insights to remove laziness from R and enable non-intrusive migration of code from lazy to eager evaluation.