[krutulis]

I've been programming for a long time and had to learn R a few years back for a series of projects. The documentation and community seemed to me, as a newcomer, to be very focused on how to solve particular statistical and modeling problems, and I was almost always able to do what needed to be done relatively quickly. (Python documentation and communities, in contrast, span all kinds of applications that can be difficult even for an experienced programmer learning Python to sort through and evaluate. I can also imagine the migration to 3.x has been a challenge for newcomers.)

Although I enjoyed learning and using R, as a CS person I was bothered that I understood how to do X in R, but I had no clue about what was happening when I did X. I found this paper to be particularly useful in describing R from a CS perspective: http://www.lirmm.fr/~ducour/Doc-objets/ECOOP2012/ECOOP/ecoop...