Should I just bite the bullet and learn R? I have no research budget, so free is appealing. At the same time, no methods colleagues to ask for help. The last few times I picked it up to do something small, I found it frustrating (tried to convert data from SPSS to Stata)

I am thinking of starting shortly. Right now is busy but I am not drowning, and I want to find a way to learn that is sustainable most of the year. I was thinking of starting with Kieran Healy's Data Visualization book, I thought that might be a fun way to do simple things.

Am not looking forward to data manipulation (another thing I have tried to do before) and data analysis. But these are the basic tasks I have to learn to do. I even have a background in programming, but ooof R feels clunky &fragile. Not like a general purpose programming language