As earl said, it's free! But that's not the most important aspect (although nice for a student). It's an actual programming language. Like Python, you can use

As earl said, it's free! But that's not the most important aspect (although nice for a student). It's an actual programming language. Like Python, you can use both non-OOP and OOP styles. You can define your own packages and namespaces (unlike MATLAB where there's just one big namespace). There are hundreds of contributed packages, you don't need to buy separate toolboxes. Not to forget, it's GPL, you can look at the source and learn a few things from people who know what they're doing (to name a few: Brian Ripley, Terry Therneau, Douglas Bates, Bill Venables). On the other hand, it can be a bit of a steep learning curve at the beginning, but I feel it's definitely worth it. It's not perfect, I stub my toe on obscure language features from time to time, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, R is the worst form of statistical languages except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time... I think that Andrew Robinson's introduction is pretty decent (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Robinson-icebreaker.pdf http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Robinson-icebreaker.pd...), but there are many others at http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html