I think there's an interesting parallel to be drawn between natural languages and programming languages:
"Work on sociolinguistic typology suggests that languages/varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to show a considerably higher degree of structural complexity than languages spoken by larger communities with more language and dialect contact (Nichols 1992, Trudgill 2004)."
I think the same could be said of R -- having evolved naturally within an (initially) small community of statisticians, there hasn't been the pressure to standardize and simplify that comes with a wider and more diverse user base.
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I think there's an interesting parallel to be drawn between natural languages and programming languages:
"Work on sociolinguistic typology suggests that languages/varieties spoken by small, isolated communities tend to show a considerably higher degree of structural complexity than languages spoken by larger communities with more language and dialect contact (Nichols 1992, Trudgill 2004)."
http://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/lang_and_lit/veranstaltunge...
I think the same could be said of R -- having evolved naturally within an (initially) small community of statisticians, there hasn't been the pressure to standardize and simplify that comes with a wider and more diverse user base.