When comparing R vs Wolfram Mathematica, the Slant community recommends R for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” R is ranked 46th while Wolfram Mathematica is ranked 60th. The most important reason people chose R is:
There are lots of different packages available that can be easily searched from the CRAN repo site and downloaded, or installed via the R command line interface. These packages are easy to include in a project or source file, and pertain to a wide variety of topics, from classification, social media analysis, and text processing to interactive 3d plotting and networks (including neural nets).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lots of packages available
There are lots of different packages available that can be easily searched from the CRAN repo site and downloaded, or installed via the R command line interface. These packages are easy to include in a project or source file, and pertain to a wide variety of topics, from classification, social media analysis, and text processing to interactive 3d plotting and networks (including neural nets).
Pro Has a wide range of options when it comes to IDEs/GUIs
Among the IDEs available there are several commercial applications as well as free and/or open-source ones, such as R Studio, which features syntax highlighting, project management capabilities, integrated terminal access, decent code completion and on-the-spot parameter hinting, graphical interfaces for package installation and such, and commendable extensibility/developer support.
Pro Lots of functionality
Pro Built-in CPU Parallelization
Pro Very mature
Wolfram Mathematica has been around for a long time without any major changes in the basic design.
Pro Coherent API over different domains
Pro Supports units and can do much more than just maths
Other platforms severely lack this useful feature.
Pro Fully integrated symbolic processing
Pro Very powerful and fast, also possible to get for free
Cons
Con Unintuitive data types and strange assignment statements
Representation of data still remains highly fragmented technically and one fumbles between data types and stumbles on strange assignment statements to attempt conversions of meaning.