I got a pointer earlier this week to a New York Times article about R. A very interesting article about the use of R in scientific communities and industrial research, mainly for statistical analysis. R is open source software, so it is free and has already taken advantage from contributions made by various authors. And (although I haven’t used it myself yet), it is a great tool for reproducible research. Using the package Sweave, authors can write a single document containing their article and the R code to reproduce the results and put them in place. This ensures that all the material is in a single place.

It also shows something about the amazing power of open source software developed by a community of authors (and typically users at the same time).