I love a lot about R, and I totally acknowledge the benefits. I don't think I would ever stop using it for data exploration and ad hoc analysis. But after tryi

I love a lot about R, and I totally acknowledge the benefits. I don't think I would ever stop using it for data exploration and ad hoc analysis. But after trying really hard over the past 3 years I'm sort of giving up ever being able to use it in a productive reliable fashion for building more complex software. It's a failing on my own part in many ways, but the loose typing and poor support for structuring code interact very badly with my personal style. When I'm working in R I literally spend 80% of my time fighting with the type system, debugging weird and wonderful features of R. I'm at the point where whenever I write an R function the first 50 lines of the code are type checks to make sure the data coming in is what I expect. I came to this point after I started systematically tracking why I was wasting so much time, and nearly every time it would come back to the type of my data being something other than what I had expected or assumed. So I'm sort of figuring if I'm at the point where I'm writing manually statically typed code in R ... I should look around for a language that's just like R but has at least slightly stronger data types built in.