As for replacing R, the whole problem is that no-one is really a fan of the syntax but there is an staggering number of packages ready to use. Bioconductor (too

As for replacing R, the whole problem is that no-one is really a fan of the syntax but there is an staggering number of packages ready to use. Bioconductor (tools for analysis of biological data: http://www.bioconductor.org/ http://www.bioconductor.org/) alone is over 500 packages whose functionality is most likely not implemented for any other language/platform.