I took a course recently in ML that focused on Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Neural Nets. The professor chose R because of the libraries.

I took a course recently in ML that focused on Support Vector Machines (SVM), Decision Trees, and Neural Nets. The professor chose R because of the libraries. SVM's, Decision Trees, and Neural Nets are non-trivial to write libraries for. In order to produce similar libraries for any other language, you need either a good grounding in math (linear algebra, PDE's, and projective geometry at the least) or a well-developed ability to translate from one language - R source for instance - to the language of your choice without understanding completely what you're translating. Regardless of your background, it will take a significant amount of time and focus to accomplish it. Our professor mentioned that Python may have libraries available now. He likes Python in general. In his research, he uses R simply due to familiarity.