I won't speak for HN, but here's a tongue in cheek summary of my experience with R.
I write a script. It doesn't work. I don't know why. I look at the error message, and then google for 30 minutes to understand what it really means - which parts of the code broke, why, how to fix them. Because none of the 3 things (which, why, how) is easy to get to.
OK, I fix it, having learned something new (like that there are infinite special cases with almost any functions).
I commit it to repo, go for coffee. In the afternoon, a colleague asks how to run that code. Well, it was a simple script, half a page, what's the problem?
I take a look, and on their machine it doesn't run. We don't know why. An hour later we discover she has some R profile file with a setting that changes behavior of some standard library... and she also has different encoding set as default, and so on, and so forth... whatever. I don't know why runtime environment encoding changes behavior of code that only deals with numbers, but hey! It's interesting at least.
We fix it, we are happy.
A few days later I run the script again. It works. The result doesn't look right though. It's mostly zeroes. Hmm.
I run it a few more times, playing around with input, trying to figure out what's up.
OK, after a few minutes I realize there's lots of red color that flashes on running the script on my screen - just so fast I barely see it.
It turns out half the code isn't really running, the script just ignores it though (errors do NOT stop the code from running), and keeps going. It produces partial output happily announcing it finished.
That is the most serious mindfuck. Everything is OK, says the prompt, here's your 1 megabyte result of the calculation, oh, just don't look at the numbers, because I havent' really run any of the code... I couldn't find one of the functions.
I sit there wondering. Which is worse: the fact that every time I try launching the script something else is happening, or the fact that the runtime environment by default will return garbage with NO warning at the end (which is the only thing you see on screen) but with a million warnings in between (which you won't see unless you have really good reflexes...).
Which is worse?
I decided at some point, that I want a language to fail, and to always give me the same result. An error, an exception, this should kill the program and shout as loud as possible "Won't give you anything". Also I want code that ran yesterday to run today, and to run on my colleague's machine, and on a newer version of R. This was never our experience.
Sounds like you aren't running your scripts as scripts. If you source a script or run it via Rscript it will halt when it hits a failure (unless you've changed a default). Copying and pasting in to the REPL will hide errors like you describe.
The other part is that it sounds like you don't have a standardized R environment. I admit that R's tooling there isn't the best, but there are options, e.g. {packrat} & {lockbox}... or better yet a Docker image.
I write a script. It doesn't work. I don't know why. I look at the error message, and then google for 30 minutes to understand what it really means - which parts of the code broke, why, how to fix them. Because none of the 3 things (which, why, how) is easy to get to.
OK, I fix it, having learned something new (like that there are infinite special cases with almost any functions).
I commit it to repo, go for coffee. In the afternoon, a colleague asks how to run that code. Well, it was a simple script, half a page, what's the problem?
I take a look, and on their machine it doesn't run. We don't know why. An hour later we discover she has some R profile file with a setting that changes behavior of some standard library... and she also has different encoding set as default, and so on, and so forth... whatever. I don't know why runtime environment encoding changes behavior of code that only deals with numbers, but hey! It's interesting at least. We fix it, we are happy.
A few days later I run the script again. It works. The result doesn't look right though. It's mostly zeroes. Hmm.
I run it a few more times, playing around with input, trying to figure out what's up.
OK, after a few minutes I realize there's lots of red color that flashes on running the script on my screen - just so fast I barely see it.
It turns out half the code isn't really running, the script just ignores it though (errors do NOT stop the code from running), and keeps going. It produces partial output happily announcing it finished.
That is the most serious mindfuck. Everything is OK, says the prompt, here's your 1 megabyte result of the calculation, oh, just don't look at the numbers, because I havent' really run any of the code... I couldn't find one of the functions.
I sit there wondering. Which is worse: the fact that every time I try launching the script something else is happening, or the fact that the runtime environment by default will return garbage with NO warning at the end (which is the only thing you see on screen) but with a million warnings in between (which you won't see unless you have really good reflexes...).
Which is worse?
I decided at some point, that I want a language to fail, and to always give me the same result. An error, an exception, this should kill the program and shout as loud as possible "Won't give you anything". Also I want code that ran yesterday to run today, and to run on my colleague's machine, and on a newer version of R. This was never our experience.