Comment by aorist

The ergonomics of grouping and aggregation in R are really much better because libraries can make of its non-standard evaluation[^0] (which in other cases also makes the language a nightmare to deal with).

Compare:

    pd_df.groupby(['date'])['failure'].count() #  pandas
    pl_df.groupby(pl.col('date')).agg(pl.count('failure')) #  polars
    dt[, .N, date] # R data.table

In both Pandas and Polars, the specification of the date has to be a string inside a list or method call, but in R it can be a bare token.

[^0]: http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html