As a software engineer raised on a traditional diet of C, Java, and Lisp, I’ve found myself downright baffled by R. I’m no stranger to mastering new programming languages, but learning R was something else: it felt like studying Finnish after a lifetime of speaking Romance languages.I’m not alone in this experience. There are piles of discussions online revealing the difficulty of using R, with some users becoming so enraged as to claim that R is “not actually a programming language”1. My strugg...