>> I would consider the R code to be slightly easier to read (notice how many quotes and brackets the Python code needs)

Oh god no, do people write R like that, pipes at the end? Elixir style pipe-operators at the beginning is the way.

And if you really wanted to "improve" readability by confusing arguments/functions/vars just to omit quotes, python can do that, you'll just need a wrapper object and getattr hacks to get from `my_magic_strings.foo` -> `'foo'`. As for the brackets.. ok that's a legitimate improvement, but again not language related, it's library API design for function sigs.

Upvoted for pipes at the beginning