I have a lot of experience teaching non-programmers R. Most of them come from an Excel/SQL background. I have found the amount of weirdness that presents a real problem is very low. And when it does get weird, I usually advise we just brush it under the rug and use a different method to accomplish the same thing. This probably sounds horrifying, but it's really not. Most of the code people write in R is not like other programming languages, it's rarely bound for anything other than the end user's laptop, if its even saved in the first place.