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by vertere 3113 days ago
The namespacing drives me nuts but it doesn't get mentioned very often in these kind of threads. How are people just ok with loading everything in the same namespace? You can use ::, but then that can have a ton of overhead.
1 comments

Yeah, the namespacing thing is crazy. If its any consolation, it was much, much worse before R 3.0. Originally, packages used to clobber each other's namespaces, which lead to much hilariousness and non-deterministic bugs.

Now those hilarious bugs only happen at the REPL, which is a little better. If these kinds of bugs cause problems for you, i strongly recommend creating packages for your analysis/projects. It doesn't add that much complexity (with devtools, at least) and it does avoid a lot of these problems. Also, R packages require documentation, which is better than many other languages.