> All of this is too bad, because R syntax is just plain rotten icky stuff. (but I may be seeing things with some of the examples looking like awful R syntax... maybe I need sleep)

If you can get over the way assignments are made, I find R's syntax, quite nice – especially with the pipe paradigm á tidyverse that is getting increasingly common. I personally find that the (from a software engineering perspective) awful syntax instead comes from many R users having a different background than those of other languages. I guess very few R users write unit tests, for example.

Of course, this is fine in most cases – messy, unengineered code is completely fine if few people will use it.