Anyone who thinks R sucks obviously hasn't used the ggplot2 package for it: http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ !
The neat thing about R is that it supports the functional paradigm, but it doesn't bash you on the head with it. My fellow programmers who are not familiar with lazy evaluation, continuations, list iterators (is that the right word? such as map / filter / fold) can still use it without feeling like they're missing an arm.
Higher-order functions, or "combinators" if you want to sound all math-y. They're not really list iterators, because it makes just as much sense to map or fold over trees, arrays, matrices, etc. Whether you need structure-specific versions like maplist, maptree, etc. is just an implementation detail.
The neat thing about R is that it supports the functional paradigm, but it doesn't bash you on the head with it. My fellow programmers who are not familiar with lazy evaluation, continuations, list iterators (is that the right word? such as map / filter / fold) can still use it without feeling like they're missing an arm.