Defaults of saving and restoring workspace

RStudio IDE
1

The first thing I do after a new RStudio install is to change Global Options to not "restore .RData into workspace at startup", and never "save workspace to .RData on exit".

I understand those defaults are those of GNU R itself, not RStudio.

RStudio already being a somewhat opinionated take on R (in my view, even more so with the tidyverse effort), would it be conceivable to change those defaults to encourage reproducibility, especially among newcomers who rely on it too much?

Edit
I just realised this has already been discussed in another topic https://forum.posit.co/t/first-line-of-every-r-script/799/12 but my question is specifically about making it the new default

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2

We generally shy away from changing defaults like this for a few reasons:

  1. There is substantial teaching material about how to use RStudio that assumes that R and RStudio will save and load the workspace for you by default,

  2. A change like this could effectively cause 'loss of information' for some users who were not expecting the new default -- that is, for better or worse, not all R users are in the 'reproducible workflow' camp, and those users would likely be unhappy to realize their R workspace suddenly appeared to vanish.

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