[semi-extrinsic]

> R is the only real game in town for free software for scientific computing these days.

You have a very very narrow definition of scientific computing, excluding a huge part of the field, i.e. anything written in C, C++ or Fortran. And I've never seen people in aerospace or civil engineering use R, it seems to be mostly popular in statistics heavy, "softer" fields such as biology or economics.

Edit: to give some examples of what I mean: show me a (molecular dynamics|computational fluid dynamics|finite element method|Poisson solver|magnetohydrodynamics solver|electrodynamics solver|general relativity code|quantum many-body solver|lattice field theory code) written in R. I haven't seen any.

[baldfat]

Just wanted to see a few. R has such a strong Fortran code base that I knew that they needed to be in R somewhere.

Molecular Dynamic - https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/bio3d/index.html

computational fluid dynamics - http://search.r-project.org/library/rjacobi/html/xinterp.htm...

finite element method - https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RTriangle/RTriangle....

Poisson - https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/isotone/isotone.pdf

[semi-extrinsic]

None of those are actually simulation codes. The first and third are pre- and post-processing tools. The second is an interpolation tool. The fourth uses Poisson distributions, which is very different from solving the Poisson equation.

[s_q_b]

We just have a mismatch in the term "scientific programming" based on our perspectives. You seem like you're in the harder sciences in academia, while I'm in data science in industry.

I'll certainly cede the point that there's a great deal of important scientific code in many languages that can't be accessed from R.

[semi-extrinsic]

>We just have a mismatch in the term "scientific programming" based on our perspectives.

Yes, exactly this.

[Mikeb85]

The thing is, R interoperates very well with C, C++ and Fortran. So when someone who uses R needs to solve one of those problems, they'll generally just use C, C++ and Fortran, then you can call the function/program from R, get your results, chart/analyse them, etc...

And of course, R makes data exploration, statistics, and all those easier problems incredibly simple.

[semi-extrinsic]

Don't get me wrong, I'm a frequent R user, and it is definitely useful for analysing at simulation results. My point was just that there is a lot of things outside of R's capabilities. Even for analysis there are areas where R is of no use, e.g. when plotting data from 3D turbulence simulations, like Q-criterion isosurfaces:

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC12/assets/images/content/Chaderji...

[s_q_b]

Yeah, for legacy or speed, you might need to drop down to lower libraries. But R makes that pretty easy.