Digging Deep

There's a good article in the New York Times on why statisticians (and lots of other folks) are increasingly using the R software package for their data analysis, prototyping, and algorithm development needs:

“The great beauty of R is that you can modify it to do all sorts of things,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And you have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already available, so you’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”