To contrast this - I'm the lead data scientist at the same company, and head over heels in love with R.... It is the only language I can quickly and efficientl

To contrast this - I'm the lead data scientist at the same company, and head over heels in love with R.... It is the only language I can quickly and efficiently jump from algebraic topology for novel pre-processing, straight into model building and validation - with just about every potential variation of every major algorithm freely available and packaged on a well curated package manager (CRAN), and then ensemble them. I _agree_ that it's a bit difficult to use in production, and that dependency management needs work (Packrat is trying to do that), and that blindly trusting packages on CRAN can cause errors - but 98% of the time - it just works. Graphics, models, crazy niche things that are currently only used by one post-doc locked away in a top secret research lab... it all just works. Of course, take this with a grain of salt: this is coming from a guy who's built web-servers (HTTP responses and all) in R.