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R
Raised as a usability problem by 116 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 86 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Quirks are unintuitive and inconsistent across packagesUnreviewed
20092026- R silently does something unexpected instead of failing, so errors go unnoticed2024-03-02
- Commenter finds the language confusing, hard to understand and inconsistent2021-05-24
- R error messages are frustrating and hard to act on2021-01-28
Confusing type behaviour and awkward syntax hinder useUnreviewed
20092026- Unintuitive names, data.frames, and non-standard evaluation make the language hard to use2025-11-26
- Language semantics are unpredictable, with weird scoping edge cases and a messy object system2024-11-21
- Unintuitive, obtuse operators and terms make the language frustrating to use2022-03-22
Using R as a command-line tool with other tools is confusingUnreviewed
20092026- Base R cannot install a specific package version, and old R versions can't install the tools needed to do it2022-03-22
- Integrating R as a CLI tool with other tools is confusing2022-02-06
- Tooling is clumsy, making replicable R environments hard to set up2021-07-11
Error messages are inscrutable or missingUnreviewed
20092026- When code fails, the errors are opaque so you must comment out code to locate the bug2018-07-30
- Error messages are inscrutable or missing, and documentation is poor2016-12-23
- Error and warning messages are very cryptic and hard to debug2013-11-22
Terse, disorganized documentation makes learning painfulUnreviewed
20092026- Documentation is too terse and generalized to understand immediately when stuck2022-03-22
- Documentation is unhelpful, and simple tasks fail for non-obvious reasons2016-02-17
- Documentation is terse and unorganized, making learning painful2012-12-06
Inconsistent function naming makes the right name hard to recallUnreviewed
20092026- Esoteric names, inconsistent parameter order, and surprising default behavior make it hard to use2025-08-15
- Inconsistent function names and too many data structures make it hard to know what a variable holds2019-04-16
- Inconsistent function naming makes it hard to recall the right function name2015-10-14
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Unintuitive names, data.frames, and non-standard evaluation make the language hard to use2025-11-26
- Must pick the right NA type or get confusing type errors2025-10-30
- Separate NA types per data type is confusing to work with2025-10-30
- Functions behave unexpectedly with slightly different arguments, breaking automated scripts and requiring workarounds2025-09-19
- Syntax is unintuitive and painful for science undergrads to learn2025-09-19
- Too many functions, hard to figure out how to combine them2025-08-16
- Hard to figure out how to combine many data manipulation functions for practical tasks2025-08-16
- Esoteric names, inconsistent parameter order, and surprising default behavior make it hard to use2025-08-15
- Hard to access underlying data and see what happens under the hood2025-06-07
- Syntax is ad hoc and unguessable, requiring lookup for every new plotting task2025-04-11
- Language semantics are unpredictable, with weird scoping edge cases and a messy object system2024-11-21
- Wrong-typed values pass silently, causing confusing errors much later in programs2024-09-19
- Slow, so simple tasks need C or Fortran wrappers, turning them into library projects2024-05-16
- Social scientists find the language cryptic and unintuitive to use2024-03-03
- R silently does something unexpected instead of failing, so errors go unnoticed2024-03-02
- Tracebacks from tidyverse and shiny combined are hard to read and resolve2024-03-02
- Tracebacks are dozens or hundreds of lines, hard to make sense of2024-03-02
- Error handling feels clumsy: tryCatch scope gotchas, confusing warning/stop distinction, and safely results needing awkward unwrapping2024-03-02
- Piped argument placement makes code hard to read and understand2023-12-30
- Making dataframe columns memory-mapped is difficult or impossible, forcing workarounds for data larger than RAM2023-04-03
- Hard to tell what the code is actually doing2023-01-22
- Global namespace and no version pinning by default make production use brittle2022-12-09
- Docs mix tutorials, reference and changelog, so the right section is hard to find2022-03-23
- Documentation is too terse and generalized to understand immediately when stuck2022-03-22
- Inconsistent operators make simple tasks frustrating, requiring fighting many slight variations2022-03-22
- Base R cannot install a specific package version, and old R versions can't install the tools needed to do it2022-03-22
- Unintuitive, obtuse operators and terms make the language frustrating to use2022-03-22
- Inconsistent, confusing language that feels like separately developed tools bundled together2022-02-06
- Integrating R as a CLI tool with other tools is confusing2022-02-06
- Can't tell from syntax which functions use non-standard evaluation, making code hard to reason about2022-01-26
- Inconsistent built-in surprises force constant doc lookups and cause silent wrong results2021-12-17
- Idiomatic fast functional tools are hidden behind obscure names and APIs, so users write slow loops2021-12-17
- Hard to find documentation explaining R functions, worse than Pandas2021-08-07
- Tooling is clumsy, making replicable R environments hard to set up2021-07-11
- Documentation is sparse; print output and indexing are hard to understand2021-07-11
- Steep learning curve implementing functions with enquo and !!, hard to debug2021-06-05
- Metaprogramming features like deparse(substitute(x)) are hard to remember and feel like dark magic2021-06-05
- Commenter finds the language confusing, hard to understand and inconsistent2021-05-24
- Can't tell which naming convention a given library uses2021-04-29
- Images create large gaps across pages, user must figure out how to fit them2021-02-03
- R error messages are frustrating and hard to act on2021-01-28
- Confusing type behaviour and awkward syntax make the language hard to work with2021-01-18
- Stop() inside an argument may or may not throw depending on the function's internals2021-01-18
- Mutually incompatible data types make basic operations confusing and force constant googling2020-05-18
- Searching for "R" on job boards returns unhelpful results2020-04-25
- Factors are annoying and confusing to manipulate when introduced early in analysis2020-04-24
- The '=' assignment operator behaves in a way programmers don't expect2020-04-24
- Legend() returns plot geometry rather than a legend, so the behaviour is unguessable without knowing the secret incantation2020-01-06
- Single and double bracket list access causes silent bugs that slip through2020-01-06
- Accessing missing list items returns NULL silently, making bugs hard to debug2019-12-15