I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name.<p>That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course that was sold as an "we will teach you R". I had heard non-programmer math friends talk about what they had accomplished in R, and was excited to dive in.<p>Now, it didn't help that the class ended up being <i>heavy</i> on the statistics side (which despite a math/cs double major, stats was never my thing), but the actually learning R part was 99% left as an exercise to us alongside of the classwork required.<p>I can say without a doubt, learning R is the worst programming experience I've ever had. Our assignments would give some high level direction on which libraries to use, but getting the right libraries setup and in the environment was just an absolute nightmare. All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python), and then spending an hour or less actually doing the statistics work.<p>I feel bad because I feel like I was setup to not be able to give it a fair chance, but if that's what non-programmer math types are subjected to when told "you need to do some programming for your job", I can understand the apprehension.