I disagree. I think if using dplyr + ggplot2 you can go very far without dealing with R's warts and I hope that the future of R lies in this direction. Honest

I disagree. I think if using dplyr + ggplot2 you can go very far without dealing with R's warts and I hope that the future of R lies in this direction. Honestly, R's syntax is not the problem, the "standard" library is the biggest problem in it's inconsistencies. That said, the other big area of complaint in R is the type system. We are too often having to coerce types, but I'm not exactly sure of the solution for that.