[twostoned]

I've actually noticed this and was totally blown out of the water by it. I understand you can use getwd() and setwd() but I thought you could simply do relative paths (similar to other languages) but it doesn't always work and I haven't figured it out.

For example, if you are loading a data.frame from a csv, my.df <- as.data.frame(read.csv("file.csv")) seems to work if the R script is in the same directory as the .csv. This is what I tend to do in .Rmd code chunks (which is my primary R workflow). It also tends to work across platforms which is handy as who knows what box I'm going to be hacking away on. However, R's preference for absolute paths in general I find very strange as I'm always on different machines with, of course, different directory structures. Isn't everyone?

Regardless, R is funky but I think I like it in a sort of awkward 'first date not sure yet' kind of vibe. I'm a noob and novice programmer otherwise though so who knows.