[whyhow]

This is silly. I bet your colleagues are making poor R programs because they are not well versed in programming, not because R is inheritanly worse than anything else.

My experience is that people who make bad R programs also make bad python programs. I don't think you should blame a tool for issues caused by the programmer.

[glofish]

try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies, each written in R by people with questionable skills.

there is no escape.

When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic, that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible. And you can't debug it because it is this awful R code everywhere! And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing.

[proverbialbunny]

glofish, do you like functional programming paradigm languages like Lisp and Haskell? It's entirely possible that R is weird and unconventional giving a negative impression, due to it being FPP.

>try loading up any scientific package and you'll see how, in turn loads up other and other packages, in bioinformatics you can easily add up to dozens if not a hundred of dependencies

That's not necessarily a bad thing unless you're trying to run R on embedded or some other constrained environment.

>When I said "colleagues" I really meant the entire scientific field runs on untold lines of buggy R code, so obtuse, so cryptic

I can't recall the last time I've bumped into a bug in an R library. I'm sure they exist but thankfully the ecosystem is quite stable.

>that the task of debugging or even tracing what is going on is practically impossible.

Debugging in R is easier than most languages. I'm unsure where you're getting your facts from.

>And when the code breaks it does not break like normal programming language do, with an error or exception or even a stack dump. No! Most of the time your R code will just start silently doing the wrong thing.

It's no worse than Python in this regard. R isn't particularly bad in this area, but it's certainly no C++.

I'm going back to guessing it's because R is FPP. That's R's dirtiest and most offensive part to the uninitiated.