[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.