My description of R: It makes hard things easy and easy things hard. Ergonomically it is the absolute worst "programming language" I've touched in my life. However somehow it managed to become the official language of statistics research and has packages to do any type of analysis you can dream of.
I think the reason you and I dislike R is because we just work differently than non-programmers. Non programmers think in purely imperative, straight-forward semantics. They write one-off unmaintainable code tying together libraries that solves their immediate problem. Programmers try and write R code as if it was a proper programming language and immediately run into walls. Non-programmers never see the walls because they don't even know there's another way.
I think the reason you and I dislike R is because we just work differently than non-programmers. Non programmers think in purely imperative, straight-forward semantics. They write one-off unmaintainable code tying together libraries that solves their immediate problem. Programmers try and write R code as if it was a proper programming language and immediately run into walls. Non-programmers never see the walls because they don't even know there's another way.