&gt; R is the only real game in town for free software for scientific computing these days.<p>You have a very very narrow definition of scientific computing, excluding a huge part of the field, i.e. anything written in C, C++ or Fortran. And I&#x27;ve never seen people in aerospace or civil engineering use R, it seems to be mostly popular in statistics heavy, &quot;softer&quot; fields such as biology or economics.<p>Edit: to give some examples of what I mean: show me a (molecular dynamics|computational fluid dynamics|finite element method|Poisson solver|magnetohydrodynamics solver|electrodynamics solver|general relativity code|quantum many-body solver|lattice field theory code) written in R. I haven&#x27;t seen any.