My daughter is in grad school, learning programming for the first time in her life. She's learning R and Python at the same time. She's finding R much more intuitive.
Speaking as a programmer, R is deeply unintuitive, but...that's for an experienced programmer's intuition. I believe it is, if not intuitive, then at least less unintuitive for someone with a background other than programming (like, say, statistics).
The typical programmer's boggled response to R, somewhat like their response to SQL or CSS, is that most of the languages they look at are descended from C, and anything that is not looks weird. Rather like someone who knows only Indo-European languages encountering a non-IE language for the first time.
Of course, any real-life language, whether R or CSS or SQL or C or anything else, has plenty of actual defects to complain about. Like, for example, "=" meaning "change the thing on my left to be the same as what's on my right". But if it's the same defects that you're used to, you don't see them as much.
I agree that if you have a background in a common programming language, R is not intuitive. I know it from personal experience.
However, for someone with no programming background, R may be quite reasonable. Just judging by my daughter's experience.
Is she being taught a particular framework in Python, e.g. pandas for doing statistics? When I was teaching programming to non-CS grad students, I chose Python for being more all-purpose and explicit in its syntax/conventions (the latter being not too important for most novices). But I envied the relative ease of setup for R – basically, download R Studio – and how quickly anyone can turn a dataset into nice-looking viz thanks to ggplot2.
Being taught is not really what's taking place. It's more like here's the task, for example the LSVT dataset from UCI - go and build a classifier.
Obviously, pandas is a workhorse, and pytorch is also on the horizon.
But, in reality she's learning by Google and skype calls with Dad. I have to say I'm stoked that I'm being able to help my daughter in grad school with homework. So many people tap out in elementary.
Hmm. A pocket knife is more intuitive than a CNC machine, especially to someone who's never seen either. Hard to recommend it for most purposes, though, particularly when scale and quality matter.
