nutshell42

> The distinction between warning, stop etc seems odd. The option to stop on warnings isn't useful because older packages seem to abuse warnings as messages.

Use suppressWarnings() to silence misbehaving functions or withCallingHandlers() to stop or handle specific conditions.

> Passing variable names as strings to dynamically generate things seems clunky compared with python.

Can you give me an elegant example in Python? Because I don't understand what you want to generate dynamically.

That said, I dislike the tidyverse solution as well. Too much abstraction for not enough benefit over a base solution with substitute()

> Functions like sapply vs mapply are tricky to reason about from the documentation alone.

Could you please expand on that? It's unclear what you're referring to.

> The values NA vs Null vs integer(0) are all used as standins for real thrown errors and knowing which one to check for after calling a function can be tough.

`checkmate::assert_numeric()` (or similar)

with base R you want isTRUE():

`stopifnot(isTRUE(is.finite(x)))` (or is.na or anything else) will error on empty values.

Finally a real reason.

A lot of the stuff above was complaining about issues where Python is a lot worse than R, about non-issues or with a fundamental misunderstanding of the language. I'd given up hope of seeing a real weakness named as such :)

There is bit64 and doubles being used as 53bit pseudo-integers - but if I needed 64bit integers, R wouldn't be my first choice, definitely.