In addition to what others have said, Mathematicas's graphics abilities make R feel like a TI-83 graphing calculator. (When was the last time you had to discuss

In addition to what others have said, Mathematicas's graphics abilities make R feel like a TI-83 graphing calculator. (When was the last time you had to discuss JPEG as a "graphics device?") The documentation is also incredibly better - every symbol/function has examples that have already been run so you can scan for a result that looks like what you need and see how they did it, and then play with the example in the documentation notebook.