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I don't know whether it's an explicit or implicit design choice or just a happy accident, but I'm grateful that the R documentation doesn't try to hold anyone's hand and guide them through data analysis beyond their training.

There was a time when NoJS plugins and the likes were valid (neccessary). These days you're crippling your browser experience more and more. Which is entirely your perogative of course, but then don't make sweeping complainst about things not working.

What did you really expect? Them to run your R code server side?

a) This wouldn't allow the same snappy response, you'd have constant page refreshes.

b) why should they overload their servers, and come up with an inferior solution to serve some self entitled anti javascript snob.

R's documentation is terse and unorganized. Anyone who says different is obviously someone with more experience with the language (which is not how it should be). When people complain about the documentation it's because they're trying to learn, and if the documentation isn't together learning is painful. Learning R is painful.

Next- Learning is painful, and the documentation is horrible because: the actual built in functions or extensions are a nightmare of arguments that [sometimes do/sometimes don't work]. If you plot x and you don't want the key to show up then set auto.key=FALSE, if you plot class(x) = [something else] and don't want the key to show up set colorkey=FALSE, if you want to layer plots: load this library and format your data to a new S3/S4 (object) type, add them together, then plot them (without the library you can't add these objects)... In case you didn't catch that: I wanted to layer the plots so I had to load a function that made the objects I wanted to plot add, not load a library that would change the plotting driver.

The community around R is disenchanted. If you get into the right place on the web and ask about a feature that doesn't exist: more often than not I've seen the typical guru response of the type "It doesn't work that way - that's a feature, not a problem." Change is bad, and in my experience generally discouraged.

Finally (and perhaps this really doesn't need to be said) the more I've been working with it - the more I feel like the reason it is so popular is because you can load it up read your data set, google some of the more central functions, and poof - get that set of characteristic statistical answers everyone needs to have in their [presentation/HW assignment]. If you look at the answers in this thread you get 2 types A) it's impossible to use, B) it does standard statistical analysis really easily. In my narrow world view it appeals to people who don't work with software a lot - professionals who need some automated numbers on the side without hiring someone to do it right.

That all said, I still do use R. You can do some nifty statistical analysis pretty easily and push it to a vector plot, pop it open with your favorite editor and post edit it super pretty (in a few days).

That's just me though.