[0xd171]

On the other hand, base R has to maintain (some degree of?) compatibility with S. Which means that all the strange design choices and weird behaviour in base R have little hope of ever changing. No number of additional packages can fix this.

[tylermw]

There is one nice thing about R core's focus on maintaining backwards compatibility, however: code from a decade ago (more often than not) will run without a hiccup on current versions of R.

Related tweets:

https://twitter.com/hrbrmstr/status/1124016682413039616

https://twitter.com/hrbrmstr/status/1122186751987073025