I was surprised at the difficulties I had using R at my previous job. It's simultaneously a language I enjoyed, and one I'd feel hesitant to recommend a friend

I was surprised at the difficulties I had using R at my previous job. It's simultaneously a language I enjoyed, and one I'd feel hesitant to recommend a friend because of the flood of complaints I'd have directed at me as they learned it. I love the concept of vectorized operations, but God almighty did I struggle with the differences between indexing a list with list[1] vs list[[1]]. Other hangups included the differences between lapply, sapply, apply or the difficulty with which one has applying operations to the rows of a dataframe. Other frustrations like naming conventions are apparently results of legacy code. I'd strongly recommend the book The R Inferno[1] by Patrick Burns. It eases you through the nine circles of R hell that most newcomers seem to endure.