The setNames + (l)apply pattern

My research is, most of the time, about the differences and similarities between two languages, Finnish and Russian. Most of the stuff I deal with is quantitative by methodology and I tend to have large datasets in the following format:

 

My usual way of getting some quick numbers out of the data for both of the languages is to use lists rather than single variables. E.g. instead of having:

    number_of_xyz_FI <- nrow(subset(mydata,lang = 'fi' & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10))
    number_of_xyz_RU <- nrow(subset(mydata,lang = 'ru' & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10))

I prefer:

    number_of_xyz <- list(
    "fi" <- nrow(subset(mydata,lang = 'fi' & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10))
    "ru" <- nrow(subset(mydata,lang = 'ru' & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10)))

Now I can reference the data in my inline text with number_of_xyz$fi and number_of_xyz$ru. This makes the global namespace less messy and looks more logical, in my opinion, at least. There is still one downside to all of this: from the perspective of reproducibility of the code and in order not to break the DRY principle, it would be good to have the members of the list set up inside a loop. So I usually end up using lapply, acting on a vector of language codes:

    number_of_xyz <- lapply(c("fi","ru"),function(thislang){
        nrow(subset(mydata,lang == thislang & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10))
    })

This still has the downside, that I have to manually set the names of the produced list, i.e.

    names(number_of_xyz) <- c("fi","ru")

which is somewhat annoying. Of course -- in the spirit of DRY, once again -- it's better to have the language codes set up as a separate variable beforehand, so that the whole thing becomes

langs <- c("fi","ru")

number_of_xyz <- lapply(langs,function(thislang){
    nrow(subset(mydata,lang == thislang & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10))
})

names(number_of_xyz) <- langs

Luckily, some time ago I found at StackOverflow a neater way to do this. The trick is to use the setNames function:

langs <- c("fi","ru")

number_of_xyz <- setNames(lapply(langs,function(thislang){
    nrow(subset(mydata,lang == thislang & variable_A == x & variable_B > 10))
},langs)

...and this whole pattern has become a real habit for me, so that every time I do a comparison, I almost immediately write setNames(lang,function(thislang),langs). A bit strange, though, that it seems like this actually is the most straight-forward of naming the list resulting from lapply.