Because the professionals are using it!
Why use R? Because that is what the professionals use!
The moral of the story is not that one should blindly use professionals’ tools; that can be just as bad as ignoring them. You don’t need to use Google or Facebook’s infrastructure to run your personal blog, just as developers shouldn’t employ the GPL simply because it’s the same license Linux or MySQL uses. But if you want a no-bullshit take on which technologies actually deliver, you could do a lot worse than watching what the professionals use.
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Perhaps. On the other hand, “professionals” tend to be rather conservative in their choice of technology, as I learned in my brief stint in industry.
While R is big in academia, and isn’t unknown in industry, probably more professionals in the “real world” use closed-source tools like Matlab for similar tasks — not because it is better than R, but just because they don’t have the time to learn the latest and greatest thing, and Matlab has been around longer. Academics have the luxury of playing with new technology just for the fun of it. Many times those technologies become used in industry, but often only years later.