I don't understand how people can loath R. If you take a functional approach, especially using pipes, dplyr and a split, apply, combine style, it is quite beautiful. Much nicer than trying to, say, divide a time period by an integer in Go.
Sure, but what if you don't? Sometimes, this is the right way to do things, other times there are other approaches that are more natural/beautiful. In many cases, a loop with conditionals is much easier to understand.