Man I dislike R for its syntax. It does a terrible disservice to people who start coding in R and then think that they "know programming" while they have missed most of the basic programming paradigms any "normal" programming language has.
I think R has a lot of similar ideology as PHP and well everyone has their own opinion about PHP.
Also I found the tutorial seriously lacking I mean no data.frames, matrices, vectors, tables or factors? How to iterate over data.frame might be the biggest thing a beginner needs to know before shooting themselves in the head. apply, lapply, sapply or vapply - which one do I need? Well IMO apply is the best one to start with as it's the basis of them all. sapply is almost the same but it just transforms the result into a vector or matrix.
apply is NOT the basis for the other *apply functions, in fact apply it's the exception. There's apply and there's lapply. The rest are variations of lapply.
As for people mistakenly believing that they "know programming" I don't think this has anything to do with R's syntax. R is a programming language but it's also a system for interactive data analysis thus the syntax had to be adapted to that end.
I think R has a lot of similar ideology as PHP and well everyone has their own opinion about PHP.
Also I found the tutorial seriously lacking I mean no data.frames, matrices, vectors, tables or factors? How to iterate over data.frame might be the biggest thing a beginner needs to know before shooting themselves in the head. apply, lapply, sapply or vapply - which one do I need? Well IMO apply is the best one to start with as it's the basis of them all. sapply is almost the same but it just transforms the result into a vector or matrix.