[DangerousPie]

I have my fair share of problems with R, but that first example (4 ways to select a column) seems a bit silly. Just off the top of my head, I could think of plenty of ways to do the same thing in Python/pandas:

    ice_cream.icol[0]
    ice_cream['col']
    ice_cream.iloc[:, 0]
    ice_cream.loc[:, 'col']
    ice_cream.ix[:, 'col']

And if you wanted to make things more convoluted, you could also wrap things into lists like the author did in the R example. So this is definitely not a problem that is unique to R or any reasonably flexible language.

[mziel]

For R at least some of it is due to R's flexibility

x$name syntax stems from data frames being really lists in disguise x[["name"]] ditto, plus because it's useful to access by string (see reflection in other languages)

x[,"name"] and x[,1] because we can also apply the matrix syntax to data frames