define "better"? They each have a few strengths over the other, but generally speaking, I much prefer the language consistency of Matlab. My general experienc

define "better"? They each have a few strengths over the other, but generally speaking, I much prefer the language consistency of Matlab. My general experience is - industrial shops will be using Matlab. Almost all of my Matlab work was aerospace related (think sigint/radar/signal processing/modeling). R is more popular in education environments - but I strongly suspect that's just because it's free. Post-grads don't have much lab funding to work with at the best of times, and Matlab with an associated set of plugins/libraries specific for your task can easily run 30k a seat. Personally - I find it pretty telling that most places with money choose Matlab. Doesn't inherently make it better, but it does mean Matlab is getting used in places where mistakes are expensive, and there's a focus and consistency to the tooling that I just think is desperately lacking in R.