[Gatsky]

Ok, but this seems pretty trivial compared to the many exclusive advantages R has. I've had minimal problems using and extending other people's software packages written in R (for bioinformatics). This has definitely not been the case with Java, R or perl, where just installing said software package is often unusually painful or impossible.

I think R is a prime example how useful a domain specific language can be. As such, I see Julia as the most viable replacement, although that will take a long, long time.