It's no more difficult to understand for researchers coming at a programming language for the first time, and they need to learn significantly less about the la

It's no more difficult to understand for researchers coming at a programming language for the first time, and they need to learn significantly less about the language to get up & running with analysis. Two lines of code will get me data loaded and run a regression analysis & plot the results. Especially consider that much of the audience for R come from proprietary and extremely expensive languages like SAS or SPSS Syntax, neither of which are significantly less difficult to work with but significantly more limited. Something more intuitive would be nice, but I'm not aware of another option that has the depth of libraries for practical every type of data analysis that can also begin getting a researcher meaningful results in few lines of code than they have fingers on their hands. (Assuming there was no catastrophic accident resulting the loss of fingers.)