But, many R tools are already vectorised, so your shift from lapply() to mclapply() is about as fair a comparison as claiming it's "just" a shift from python's builtin map() to pool.map(). Anybody can play this game, and it's not helpful. I've been using+teaching R now for nearly seven years and the number of times I've used lapply can be counted on one hand.

> just

https://justsimply.dev/

There is also this in the futureverse if you like for loop style code more:

  library(doFuture)
  plan(multisession)

  y <- foreach(x = 1:4, y = 1:10) %dofuture% {
    z <- x + y
    slow_sqrt(z)
  }

https://dofuture.futureverse.org/

I use sapply all the time to transform data all the time. It tends to be less code (no counter, no output initialisation ) and easier to follow if that style is familiar.

I am curious now, what do you use instead of lapply (or other *apply variants)?

> just

This isn't documentation or a guide or helping someone.

It's a friendly competition between languages so it gets to use the perspective of someone that's familiar with things.