you are underestimating the price of that by at least an order of magnitude. That is one of the biggest reasons people like R. R also has the notion of NA, wh

you are underestimating the price of that by at least an order of magnitude. That is one of the biggest reasons people like R. R also has the notion of NA, which is different than NaN, built into the language. The other huge reason for R adoption is it makes running stat analyses very simple, so for all the people who aren't programmers, and don't wish to be programmers, R is an awesome choice. The ability to, in 3 simple lines of R, load data from a csv, run a glm, and get a sophisticated report on the model is awesome.