Not wrong, just not what you're used to. Oh, and not to mention the `1`-based indexing! Such heresy!

R excels at two things: statistical packages and generating reports/papers (the rmarkdown ecosystem is simply fantastic at this). If either of those two things are the key features of your product it makes sense to use R for the rest of the glue code. I write R daily and I'm very productive with the language (having built a small ecosystem of tools to aid me with the mundane stuff).

If you're willing to give R a chance I highly recommend you check out syberia.io - it's a framework like rails/django for creating statistical models in R and packaging them into API containers.