R does have some weirdness (it took me ages to understand the index and slice notations), but it is very expressive. I'm not a mathematician, and I've been pro

R does have some weirdness (it took me ages to understand the index and slice notations), but it is very expressive. I'm not a mathematician, and I've been programming Python for 15 years, but I'd always pick R for its stated problem domain given a choice. I highly recommend "The Art Of R Programming" for learning R as a programming language. The statistical side of things are then easier to layer on top of that.