Most of those problems have existing solutions. 1. Do you know about browser()? That gives you an interactive debugger on par with most programming languages.

Most of those problems have existing solutions. 1. Do you know about browser()? That gives you an interactive debugger on par with most programming languages. Also see the GUI wrapper to the debugger in RStudio. 2. Share a library (a collection of installed packages). I'm not sure how you're doing this with python libraries, but there's probably a straightforward equivalent in R. 3. Once MySQL implements the new the DBI 0.3.0 interface, the function name will dbFetch(). But at heart the function is named that way because R uses generic function style OO, rather than message-passing OO - it's nothing to do with sloppiness. I'd recommend reading up a bit on the advantages and disadvantages of each style of OO.