| 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. |