It's not just that. R has a few things going for it: 1. It's a functional language, and functional programming style lends itself really well to matrix opera

It's not just that. R has a few things going for it: 1. It's a functional language, and functional programming style lends itself really well to matrix operations (and the engine of stats is all about matrices). 2. Matrices are baked really deeply into the language, which makes the functional style even more powerful. (my understanding is that what makes the formula interface work so well). 3. R can be viewed as coating of syntactic sugar on a lot of very useful fortran libraries. On the other hand I once saw some open source toolkit for natural language processing in R. I had two issues with that. Firstly WTF was the author thinking doing all his general purpose programming in R. And two I didn't want to investigate further because as NLP is largely about general purpose operations and I didn't want to get sucked into that rabbit hole.