Writing a variant of this article has become a rite of passage for all serious users of R. There are two issues that contribute to the difficulties people experience with R. First, yes, R can be confusing at times. Tal explains this really well, but only scratches the surface. There is so much more confusing and counter-intuitive stuff, for example with regards to factors that only very few people seem to understand fully. However, there is a second issue, and this is less often acknowledged: People expect R to be immensely powerful and at the same time easy to use, which is really not a very reasonable thing to expect. This attitude is fairly specific to the R community. No C++ developer would dare to write a long rant about the shortcomings of C++ while at the same time nonchalantly admitting that they never made a serious attempt to learn it. One symptom of this problem is that hardly any self-proclaimed R hacker has read Matloff's book "The Art of R Programming" which was for a long time, and perhaps still is, the only book on R programming. The mere fact that there is (or was) only one such book speaks volumes.