>The documentation is inanely bad. I can't explain it.

I'm surprised that the author is saying this as I've experienced exactly the opposite. R completely documents all the arguments and outputs of its functions, and documentation is easy to pull up by function, and this is almost universal both for distribution and community packages. Additionally the documentation often includes vignettes that show full examples.

In contrast, Python documentation is most often documented on long pages that mentions functions, but does not describe arguments or the output. I've found almost no Python documentation to be adequate, outside of some of the core functions. And when it is adequate, it's exceedingly verbose, and lacking in examples, basically the worst of all worlds.