[tekkk]

Man I dislike R for its syntax. It does a terrible disservice to people who start coding in R and then think that they "know programming" while they have missed most of the basic programming paradigms any "normal" programming language has.

I think R has a lot of similar ideology as PHP and well everyone has their own opinion about PHP.

Also I found the tutorial seriously lacking I mean no data.frames, matrices, vectors, tables or factors? How to iterate over data.frame might be the biggest thing a beginner needs to know before shooting themselves in the head. apply, lapply, sapply or vapply - which one do I need? Well IMO apply is the best one to start with as it's the basis of them all. sapply is almost the same but it just transforms the result into a vector or matrix.

[yummy]

Agree. It's amazing how such an ugly and inconsistent language can have so many great packages.

[cecilialee]

The inconsistency is something that's quite annoying though.

[lottin]

apply is NOT the basis for the other *apply functions, in fact apply it's the exception. There's apply and there's lapply. The rest are variations of lapply.

As for people mistakenly believing that they "know programming" I don't think this has anything to do with R's syntax. R is a programming language but it's also a system for interactive data analysis thus the syntax had to be adapted to that end.