[xtracto]

Yeah, I find it kind of funny when people compare a general purpose programming language with a statistical software. In R you have libraries for things like Apprximate Bayesian Computation, parametric and non-parametric statistics, and even neural networks.

Sure, you could achieve the same with a general purpose PL, but you would have to implement everything from scratch.

[gte910h]

Several general purpose languages (Fortran, Python, and Matlab ) have very nice statistical programming packages at the current date.