Great comparison. However, I find R's syntax as obtuse and baroque. Like a shovel with a compartment that carries tweezers. Advocates tend to argue that for moving dirt, this 'R' shovel is far more precise than an ordinary 'Python' shovel. But Python is in fact more like the toolshed from which both tools are housed plus a whole lot more.
Well yeah, and I use them, but they're a bandaid over the fundamental problem that just like in Perl, in R TIMTOWTDI. It's the classic 'we have 12 standards, time to make a unifying one - now we have 13' problem. I've sort of gotten used to it now, but it was majorly difficult at first for me (after having programmed for nearly 20 years) to get used to the concept that any task can be done in 20 different ways, each one just as 'valid' or 'easy' or 'maintainable' as the others. At least in C++ there are 20 bad ways to do something, and one good one - the way that Sutter covered in his columns. I know it's not quite fair to compare 'just' the C++ programming language to R and all its packages, but still.
Just curious, what in particular did you find obtuse?
It's not like R does not have obtuse and baroque parts, it certainly does, and their obtus-ity is rather high, but IMO they are not parts of the language a casual user would likely encounter...
On the other hand, Python has quite a few pitfalls itself -- but I suspect a casual user would, for example, run into Python default arguments a bit sooner than she would run into R environments :)
