[mattkrause]

On the other hand, one of the other major data analysis platforms went the other way: R is a free implementation of S language. TIBCO still sells S-PLUS, but my impression is that R is much, much more popular.

My impression is that Octave always lags a little behind Matlab, both in terms of features and performance, since the matlab language is essentially whatever The Mathworks says it is. R and S-PLUS both have a somewhat formal definition in the form of books and articles, which might help keep them in sync.

[jordigh]

R's and Octave's story is very different. Essentially one of the key originators of S, John Chambers, started to work on R. That would be like Cleve Moler being a core Octave contributor.

[kgwgk]

At what point did Chambers became involved in R?

[jordigh]

The very beginning. Chambers was involved with the initial design of R.

[jacobolus]

How much money does R make? Are the main R contributors working as processional academics, do they have corporate jobs that pay them to work part-time on R, or are they funded full time by donations/grants, or is R just a hobby side project for them?

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Octave, or R, or GIMP, or ..., only that it’s difficult to make money on it.

This is especially true for Octave though, because someone who wants to do exploratory numerical computing and doesn’t have a specific need for Matlab’s library ecosystem is likely to use Python or Julia or R or ...

[mattkrause]

I'm not sure either, but I would guess it's a mix. It seems like it's most of Hadley Wickham's career, for example, and there's clearly some work being done by the RStudio and Revolution Analytics folks, but a lot of the packages are clearly the product of people working on their academic or corporate jobs. My impression is that this is also true for most matlab toolboxes (though obviously not the core language), which doesn't quite explain why people use Matlab (but not Octave), versus R (and not S-PLUS)