That said, a lot of the use-case of R is one-off scripts, run locally on a machine by an analyst, as part of preparing a written report for non-technical stakeholders. So the code readability isn't as important.
This is both a strength and weakness of R in general. The R community has many different ways to accomplish the same goals. Production systems decline to use R in large part because of the code maintenance burden across a team, versus Python's "one right way" approach.
That said, a lot of the use-case of R is one-off scripts, run locally on a machine by an analyst, as part of preparing a written report for non-technical stakeholders. So the code readability isn't as important.
This is both a strength and weakness of R in general. The R community has many different ways to accomplish the same goals. Production systems decline to use R in large part because of the code maintenance burden across a team, versus Python's "one right way" approach.