A common criticism of R, especially from data scientists who are new to R but proficient in multiple programming languages, is that R is “quirky” and annoying because there is almost always more than one way to do simple things. I usually counter that they are trying to say that R is “flexible” and “rich”, but by the time we get around to talking about plots I have to concede that my data scientist friends have a point. There are, after all, three completely different major plotting systems in R: the base graphics system, lattice plots and the ggplot2. Each...