Just curious, what in particular did you find obtuse? It's not like R does not have obtuse and baroque parts, it certainly does, and their obtus-ity is rather

Just curious, what in particular did you find obtuse? It's not like R does not have obtuse and baroque parts, it certainly does, and their obtus-ity is rather high, but IMO they are not parts of the language a casual user would likely encounter... On the other hand, Python has quite a few pitfalls itself -- but I suspect a casual user would, for example, run into Python default arguments a bit sooner than she would run into R environments :)