Like many modern languages, R supports multiple programming paradigms, including sequential, object-oriented, and functional, but it should take more than a couple of functional features to declare something a full-blown FPL. A duck-billed platypus is not a duck.
Yes, you can write R code in a functional style in places when convenient, but one floor down it's still running that loop you didn't want to see. It's a language based on mutable values and sequential execution and looping, not pure function calls and recursion. The syntax itself is very much sequential, unlike stereotypical FPLs. Even the lexical scoping design relies fundamentally on mutable environments. So yes, people do seem to enjoy proudly declaring R a FPL citing a few features, but as I said, those features make R as much a FPL as Python.
Yes, you can write R code in a functional style in places when convenient, but one floor down it's still running that loop you didn't want to see. It's a language based on mutable values and sequential execution and looping, not pure function calls and recursion. The syntax itself is very much sequential, unlike stereotypical FPLs. Even the lexical scoping design relies fundamentally on mutable environments. So yes, people do seem to enjoy proudly declaring R a FPL citing a few features, but as I said, those features make R as much a FPL as Python.