> it has a lot of well-tested functions I tried to do a simple word cloud based on a Twitter search in R. The whole thing was plagued by mysterious failures du

> it has a lot of well-tested functions I tried to do a simple word cloud based on a Twitter search in R. The whole thing was plagued by mysterious failures due, AFAICT, to weird, rare, non-standard UTF characters in the source data that were crashing some of the R libraries I was using to clean the data. Having done that before in Python, it was shocking to see how fragile the R ecosystem is.