R’s meta programming facilities are head and shoulders above Python’s, which I think explains the brilliance of dplyr and dbplyr. But I feel like with R you have to scrape back a bunch of layers to get to the Schemey parts. I’ve always wondered what Hadley and Co would have done with dplyr and dbplyr had they had something like Racket at their disposal.
I was offended the first time I encountered R's nonstandard evaluation, but it didn't take long to accept it. Now I wonder why anyone would want to write `mytable.column` a million times when it's obvious from context what `column` is referred to, and the computer can reliably figure it out for you with some simple scoping rules. It's a superior notation that facilitates focus on the real underlying problem, and data analysts love that.
