When I was writing a summary of a book chapter, I was a little disappointed how poorly the authors argued in favor of R. That is why I was adding my two most favorite arguments in favor of R. Those are

  1. Fast prototyping and
  2. Good infrastructure and good integration of Literate Programming paradigms.

Fast prototyping stands for the quick turn-over of ideas into code. That means once you have a dataset and you want to try some ideas or draw some graphics, this can be done very quickly in R. In a Google Tech Talk Dirk Edelbuettel showed a nice example of what this really means. Got you interested, please read on …