Sure, but my point is that this cuts both ways.

E.g. I could just as easily write

"one downside of autovectorization, is that a typo can lead to non-obvious errors in calculations. When I want the exponential of a matrix, I might accidentally write exp(M) and get unwanted vectorization. This is a typo that can lead to non-obvious errors in calculations. Julia avoids this with a exp.(M) syntax."

I think the potential for typos is symmetric here between julia and R. I think what's asymmetric though is that Julia's broadcasting is more extensible, less and hoc and more general than R's auto-vectorization since it can be done over arbitrary containers and you can control precisely what calls broadcast.

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Sorry if this comes off as confrontational, that's not my intention. I just think this is a very interesting and fruitful corner of language design.