Dirk's answer on that page is what I believe to be the prevailing viewpoint. Why switch? R is very productive and more than suitable for data exploration. If yo

Dirk's answer on that page is what I believe to be the prevailing viewpoint. Why switch? R is very productive and more than suitable for data exploration. If you need to you can always write pieces of your research tool chain in C++ and integrate it quite easily with RCpp. Many of the R packages do just this. I find R to be very enjoyable, if not a bit eccentric at times. The combination of R, RStudio, and Vim make it a very productive environment for data exploration and modelling. That being said, all of my production code is typically implemented in C++. However, knowing that I can always integrate with R from C++ if I need to (for example, if I'm too lazy to implement an available algorithm in some R package). If I did do this it would merely be a stop gap until a suitable C++ implementation could be deployed.