I think trust is a bigger deal in the R community than say Ruby. With a gem you can tell pretty quickly if it works or not, and the community has a higher standard of testing.
With R, many of the packages are for complicated math and stats. That particular package might pass all it's internal tests, but what if they implemented a distribution wrong, or calculated 95% confidence incorrectly? That is when you have to trust the developer personally.
With R, many of the packages are for complicated math and stats. That particular package might pass all it's internal tests, but what if they implemented a distribution wrong, or calculated 95% confidence incorrectly? That is when you have to trust the developer personally.