A very unusual claim we have here, on the link-through to Matloff: “The Tidyverse also borrows from other "purist" computer science (CS) philosophies, notably functional programming (FP). The latter is abstract and theoretical, difficult even for CS students, and thus it is clear Tidy is an unwise approach for nonprogrammer students of R.”
This seems to be the root of the argument, and it is a completely bizarre statement.
I agree with Matloff's overall point, though. "Tidy programming" (which came to mean non-standard evaluation) is very hard to understand, even for R professionals. It relies on directly handling symbols, and encourages using new notations to do it. Debugging is even more complex with NST code, and people learning the language will be doing a lot of debugging. I can't imagine a good way to introduce functions to newer users when using NST. You'd have to first mention environments, scoping, and symbols.
My rant aside, I did find this next quote from Matloff a better argument for using dplyr:
> mean(Nile[80:100])
"printing the mean Nile River flow during a certain range of years. Incredibly, not only would this NOT be in a first lesson with Tidy, the students in a Tidy course may actually never learn how to do this. Typical Tidiers don't consider vectors very important for learners, let alone vector subscipts."
With dplyr, you'd subset based on a `filter()`, likely specifying the years to keep. It encourages self-explanatory code. Matloff's vector subscript tells me nothing about why certain elements are kept.
This seems to be the root of the argument, and it is a completely bizarre statement.