Yeppo. Also, for myself at least in the geospatial realm, I need raster, rgdal, sp, sf, and parallel. The primary allure of R (imo) is the thousands of packages

Yeppo. Also, for myself at least in the geospatial realm, I need raster, rgdal, sp, sf, and parallel. The primary allure of R (imo) is the thousands of packages that allow you to quickly and easily implement whatever you want to do. Combine those with data.table and parLapply, and you're off to the races.