On Best Practice Optimization Methods inR

R (R Core Team 2014) provides a powerful and flexible system for statistical computations. It has a default-install set of functionality that can be expanded by the use of several thousand add-in packages as well as user-written scripts. While R is itself a programming language, it has proven relatively easy to incorporate programs in other languages, particularly Fortran and C. Success, however, can lead to its own costs: Users face a confusion of choice when trying to select packages in approaching a problem. A need to maintain workable examples using early methods may mean some tools offered as a default may be dated. In an open-source project like R, how to decide what tools offer