I used to think R's debugging was awful. Then someone told me about options(error="recover"), and I get a nice Lisp/Matlab like stack when something bad happens

I used to think R's debugging was awful. Then someone told me about options(error="recover"), and I get a nice Lisp/Matlab like stack when something bad happens. Doesn't help with the C/C++ FFI piece, but that's not usually what is needed. There's a lot of little doodads like that in R. The real problem is there is no good book teaching people who need to write complex things how to do it properly.