I taught an undergraduate investment class with R last year, and the students really liked it. Unlike Python, R is 1-based indexing, which makes students without any CS background more comfortable.
To my experience, 0-based indexing and for loops will drive out 90% my students from my class. I never teach for loops, and keep all tasks within data.frames and the Tidyverse ecosystem. Also, the installation of packages is much easier in R. I personally think that all social science departments should teach some R to students.
However, I did find one thing that deserves some attention. When students look at the RStudio website, they find that all these kinds of things like Shiny, Rmarkdown, Tidyverse, look very colorful and modern. When they go to CRAN to download R, the website looks like something that belongs to 1980s.
This strong contrast is noticeable. From a marketing perspective, first impression is very important. When a student goes to CRAN first, he or she might think, gee, I am not gonna use this old stuff. If he or she goes to RStudio first, there might a be a different result.
I am totally OK with the concise website design of CRAN. However, nowadays students are used to more colorful things. I was wondering if it is possible to make the CRAN website look a little bit more colorful and modern. Actually, I do not think there are any other websites of programming language that look so old fashioned. If you look at the website of ada programming language, it is also very new.