[evandev]

I disagree with R being more useless without r studio. I'm not a fan of R overall, but I run everything in tmux+vim and R is the same way. I prefer it to Rstudio. It's popular, because it makes a few choices which are different many programming languages to be geared towards writing scripts for statistics. (e.g. index 0, assignments)

[peatmoss]

I'll second the utility of alternative environments to RStudio. For me, I love RStudio, but I spend too much time in Python (and occasionally dabbling in others) to use it all the time. So, for me it's Emacs Speaks Statistics, which is fantastic.

As a side benefit, the first time I tried dabbling in Julia, I was pleasantly surprised to have a familiar mature environment work with it out of the box.