R has a lot of surprises built in and is fairly inconsistent. That makes it harder to fully learn (always have to pull up docs for everything). Also it means ev

R has a lot of surprises built in and is fairly inconsistent. That makes it harder to fully learn (always have to pull up docs for everything). Also it means every so often I'll forget some weird edge case of a function and get a totally wrong result. For a certain class of work, this is fine: if you use it every day and are confident catching errata you'll learn all the weirdnesses. Many professional programmers work in a half dozen languages a week, so one that is significantly harder to learn will feel frustrating. For me it'll be actually slower to get the same result as other tools since I have to relearn its unique way of working.