[blubber]

"The reason you can use this simpler syntax in R is because it’s non-standard-evaluation ..."

So it actually is about Python vs R.

That said, while this kind of non-standard evaluation is nice when working interactively on the command line, I don't think it's that relevant when writing code for more elaborated analyses. In that context, I'd actually see this as a disadvantage of R because you suddenly have to jump through loops to make trivial things work with that non-standard evaluation.

[_Wintermute]

The increasing prevalence of non-standard evaluation in R packages was one of the major reasons I switched from R to python for my work. The amount of ceremony and constant API changes just to have something as an argument in a function drove me mad.

[disgruntledphd2]

> nd constant API changes

Yeah, this was so very very painful. I once ended up maintaining a library that basically used all the different NSE approaches, which was not very much fun at all.