Well, my friend who works with R more consistently likes it ok too. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Also, he's the statistician, so perhaps it's quirky structure relates to the data in some way a laymen can't understand.

But sometimes he just wants to loop through a list and he goes a bit crazy.

Statisticians tend to learn R in school. It's quirky structures are a major source of prototyping slowdown/technical debt. I recommend using Python/Pydata when people ask my advice in starting out. Once one learns Python then R isn't too bad to pick up.

I assume you meant Lisp. R started out as a Scheme dialect, so yes, there is definitely a connection.