Just like any other programming language, it DOES take a good programmer to make a decent library in R that people can use on their own problems. R has had a v

Just like any other programming language, it DOES take a good programmer to make a decent library in R that people can use on their own problems. R has had a very long evolution. It is a very different beast today in its most common usage, than it was the earlier days 10, 20+ years ago. Even the Tidyverse has some libraries that are very much crafted with a programmer mindset like purrr and tidyr. These tools are decidedly non-imperative and not straight-forward in their semantics. What makes R difficult for experienced programmers, I think, is the inconsistency of paradigms that are the result of its long history. This complicates how one writes library code. There is, however, a "sweet-spot" for R and that would be as a "notebook" based programming language much like Mathematica, Matlab, and Julia. Which one you like, I guess, depends on your taste, your own history, and the killer libraries you want to use. Whenever I have to describe what R is all about to excel jockeys at work, I just say it's "excel on sterioids". I think that's fair (albeit reductive) description. To be honest, I probably would have never learned R if Julia had existed when I started picking up R. I think I would have preferred a more ahistorical language with less "baggage" than R. But it's always worked out for me, so I am sticking to it at least for now.