To my mind some of R's plusses are data frames and the ability to indicate missing values in vectors of any type. Some of the weird stuff is the lazy evaluatio

To my mind some of R's plusses are data frames and the ability to indicate missing values in vectors of any type. Some of the weird stuff is the lazy evaluation of arguments, the ability to know the names of variables bound to function arguments, and the ability to snoop up the environment stack. Some distinct minuses are the changing of types (dropping of dimensions on select), semi-reserved terms, and c()'s squashing of complex types. One of my articles on the topic: Survive R http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/09/survive-r/ http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/09/survive-r/ .