Correct. The language R is just plain weird (insane ideas about scoping/binding that seem to be completely unlike anything you've seen in any reasonably designe

Correct. The language R is just plain weird (insane ideas about scoping/binding that seem to be completely unlike anything you've seen in any reasonably designed language in the last 20 years) and not very efficient to boot, unless you hit one of the bits that's just C under the hood. However, the vast, vast repository of every statistical analysis under the sun - not just 'core R' but every thing that any statistician has hacked up - is unparalleled. My 'coping with R' strategy is to do all the heavy lifting data manipulation in C/C++/Python, then do one-shot things in R. I just pass csv files around but there are tighter integrations of R and python if you want to look into that.