> The problem is people using R without trying to learn about the language itself, just assuming it works like their favourite language.
I think you just explained Perl in a nutshell (err, the idiom, not the book). It seems whenever a language supports enough idioms of the usual C-like languages people will gravitate towards those, likely due to the high population of people that know those idioms and can fall-back on them without having to think too hard. I doubt Lisp has as much of a problem of people trying to write C in Lisp.
I think you just explained Perl in a nutshell (err, the idiom, not the book). It seems whenever a language supports enough idioms of the usual C-like languages people will gravitate towards those, likely due to the high population of people that know those idioms and can fall-back on them without having to think too hard. I doubt Lisp has as much of a problem of people trying to write C in Lisp.