R won because of 1 - very high usability, particularly (contrast to python) for users who aren't developers, don't think like developers, and don't want to be

R won because of 1 - very high usability, particularly (contrast to python) for users who aren't developers, don't think like developers, and don't want to be developers 2 - very high expressibility 3 - it's free, so you can install it on lab computers and your laptop and everywhere else without forking out tons of money (see the price of matlab) 4 - a generate of grad students used it and it, in turn, was taught to a generate of undergrads 5 - academic statisticians tend to like it and tend to implement stats techniques in it, so there's a wide body of shared code on cran implementing most analyses you can think of