Don't mistake explicitness for verbosity. Soon we'll see someone posting a Perl oneliner to do the same, claiming R is also verbose. Conciseness is not a goal,

Don't mistake explicitness for verbosity. Soon we'll see someone posting a Perl oneliner to do the same, claiming R is also verbose. Conciseness is not a goal, clarity is. if you have to expand the operations in your mind, you may well spend more time thinking about your code then when it's written fully, perhaps factored into a properly named function.