The thing to keep in mind is that, from the point of view of someone who works with data, R isn't a programming language. It's a statistical software package that has a programming language. Its competitors are things like Minitab, SPSS, Stata, and JMP, all of which used to be entirely menu-driven. R was a genuine innovation when it was first introduced.

Now it's certainly showing its age and the limits of its design, but it's still best in class for a certain kind of user. We could do better for software development, but it's not clear that doing so would actually make data analysis easier.