I've written an interpreter for R (a subset; it was for school and I left out some features like S4 and the condition system) so I have done some pretty deep di

I've written an interpreter for R (a subset; it was for school and I left out some features like S4 and the condition system) so I have done some pretty deep dive into the language reference and GNU R source. I agree with the author's sentiment - I love a lot of what R has, but there is a lot of small madnesses. There are so many unique PL ideas in R (may not actually be unique but certainly unique among common languages today) - first class environments - named, default parameters and even the ... parameter which encourages the pattern of hierarchical library functions - there's one large customizable main workhorse function, and many wrapper functions that specify some defaults or add some behavior, but all the underlying customizations are exposed through ... - copy on write as a default - ability to choose evaluation strategy But I also wonder how many of these cool ideas would actually work well in a saner language