Just being an open source and free platform for performing statistical tests was probably enough to make R extremely successful when it first launched. At the t

Just being an open source and free platform for performing statistical tests was probably enough to make R extremely successful when it first launched. At the time Python didn't have any widely used and extensible statistical libraries, and matlab/SASS cost a great deal of money and are difficult to deploy. R's growth since then is probably due to the fantastic packaging system.