> What justification is there for preferring R to Matlab, other than cost?
My impression is that the primary problem domains for these two are pretty different.
Matlab is pretty heavily targeted at folks doing numerical analysis [1], e.g. solving differential equations related to physics/engineering/economics, and has its origins as a wrapper around existing fortran implementations for numerical linear algebra. Engineers, especially, use Matlab all over the place.
The R project explicitly is interested with statistics [2], and as someone earlier pointed out, make is pretty easy to do analysis on a dataset. Though, I have pretty limited experience with R, so I could be mistaken.
[1] Cleve Moler. Numerical Computing with MATLAB. http://www.mathworks.com/moler/chapters.html
This is the guy who wrote the first Matlab implementations, and founded Mathworks.
My impression is that the primary problem domains for these two are pretty different.
Matlab is pretty heavily targeted at folks doing numerical analysis [1], e.g. solving differential equations related to physics/engineering/economics, and has its origins as a wrapper around existing fortran implementations for numerical linear algebra. Engineers, especially, use Matlab all over the place.
The R project explicitly is interested with statistics [2], and as someone earlier pointed out, make is pretty easy to do analysis on a dataset. Though, I have pretty limited experience with R, so I could be mistaken.
[1] Cleve Moler. Numerical Computing with MATLAB. http://www.mathworks.com/moler/chapters.html This is the guy who wrote the first Matlab implementations, and founded Mathworks.
[2] The R Project for Statistical Computing. http://www.r-project.org/