That could have been expressed more diplomatically, but I think you're right. IMHO, what people should try to understand about new languages first most thorough

That could have been expressed more diplomatically, but I think you're right. IMHO, what people should try to understand about new languages first most thoroughly, are its native data types. This is more fundamental than the syntactical constructs. R's data types are one of its most alien part, and that's why I think if you're coming from another language, chapter 20 of Hadley Wickham's book[1] is the most important one. [1] https://r4ds.had.co.nz/vectors.html https://r4ds.had.co.nz/vectors.html