R is data-first language while python a general purpouse

[jangorecki]

This is very nice Q and A, quite relevant in this repo
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57490815/simple-data-operations-r-vs-python

Your R example does look more succinct, but Python is much more general purpose so oneliners like that don't necessarily fit within the design goals. You're right that there are more characters to represent certain operations, but that is because pandas was designed for python, which is not a "data-first" type language.