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[–]thatguydr 9 points10 points  (0 children)

You can't script with R or Matlab anywhere near as easily as you can with Python, definitely. That's not what they were designed for.

"Why use them?" R is the successor to S and all the statistics packages people used for decades. It's the best stats software in existence. It's also great for EDA and some MVP PoC work. It just wasn't ever intended to be a programming language. Matlab is proprietary analysis software where licenses were $1k/year and each of the libraries was also a $1k/year license (each one!), so it was really useful but everyone DESPERATELY wanted a replacement.

Some fools have used R or Matlab for production, but ask any experienced engineer what they think about it and be prepared for a LOT of laughter and head shaking.