I'm not so sure. A few years ago in university I took a stats course (offered by the maths department) that had twice-weekly mandatory labs where we learned and used R. Most people in the course were not programmers at all, and I ended up helping people most of the time during the course.

R is really weird, but non-programmers are typically unaccustomed to precisely typing non-english into a computer. They aren't trained to quickly spot syntax errors or grok error messages.