R is awful. It's full of decisions made by people who seem to not have much programming experience, in that they seem good at the time but cause major issues later on. See, for instance, http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2012/06/08/r-the-master-troll... , http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2008/12/use-equals-or-ar... , http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2012/02/29/parsin... , and the necessity of http://tim-smith.us/arrgh/ (I wrote up some stuff about the *apply functions, but not yet in a form suitable for the guide: https://github.com/tdsmith/aRrgh/issues/18 ) .