I thought that was what everyone was using it for. What are people using it for?
Anyway, I think it's better to make use of a small, commonly used, and well tested library instead of reinventing the wheel again and again. Libraries are not one of my concerns I have with R.
now what if I told you that the majority (perhaps all) of these libraries you loaded and are needed to run the complex analyses in life sciences were all developed by people who are oblivious to proper software engineering. These were never meant to be used the way they are used - expose myriad of global variable names, methods etc.
You say you are using a small well-tested library with R, sure - but that is not what happens in science and for those that see what is going on, we know we're completely FKDd
The tragedy is that we cannot cure cancer as long we try to do it with R - and R is not going anywhere ...
I don't know a single package that exposes global variables. I only know packages that expose certain functions and provide some configuration via options. In R, there are no really private variables though. If you want, you can access anything you want. Since everthing is packaged in its own environment, I don't see that as a problem though since the global namespace doesn't get polluted. It won't make people with a background in one of the more modern OOP languages happy but that's probably not that important.