[ggrothendieck]

The packages that were used in statistics were SAS, SPSS and Stata. perl is not a statistical package and has nowhere near the depth of statistical capabilities of R.

Don't forget that I also mentioned the checkpoint package in my post. You only need to know the date for that, not the version of each of the packages.

In your last paragraph I think you are referring more to software development practices than what is available through R. Simply using R or any language doesn't guarantee this.

[scientism]

That's a very roundabout way to solve an actual problem. In many cases you don't pin your package version to _latest_ (whatever that date is) and you need a more fine-grained solution to keeping package versions. I don't think that solves this and I don't know if you can do it with checkpoint.

[ggrothendieck]

Of course it is possible to screw up but if you don't update your packages and record the date that does not seem to be R's fault.