I think the desired functionality is closer to Pandas than Numpy — you want coordinated arrays of different data types, not higher-dimension arrays of the same

I think the desired functionality is closer to Pandas than Numpy — you want coordinated arrays of different data types, not higher-dimension arrays of the same data type. R and Pandas aren’t exactly known for their outstanding native performance (they’re generally fast after converting dataframes to arrays and outsourcing to C or Fortran) so they’re great demonstrations of the syntax for some of these indexing problems but leave a lot to be desired.