In R you'd typically want to operate over vectors (rows or columns, with columns being the faster option) rather than on individual values. This requires a bit of a mental shift when you come to R from a C/Cuda background or even python.

You can find the man pages right in R console - look up `?lapply` for column-wise operations and `?apply` for row-wise.

When it comes to data.frame transformations you are typically better off using packages from `hadleyverse` - check https://github.com/hadley/reshape and https://tidyr.tidyverse.org/

Of course, what's important is not the technology used, but the problem solved. Fantastic that python works for you.