Dear all,
 
I was reading with great interest your comments about the use of R in
the industry. Personally, I use R as scripting language in the financial
industry, not so much for its statistical capabilities (which are
great), but more for programming. I once switched from S-Plus to R,
because I liked R more, it had a better and easier to use documentation
and it is faster (especially with loops).
 
Now some colleagues of mine are (finally) eager to join me in my
quantitative efforts, but they feel that they are more at ease with
Matlab. I can understand this. Matlab has a real IDE with symbolic
debugger, integrated editor and profiling, etc. The help files are
great, very comprehensive and coherent. It also could be easier to
learn.
 
And, I was very astonished to realise, Matlab is very, very much faster
with simple "for" loops, which would speed up simulations considerably.
So I have trouble to argue for a use of R (which I like) instead of
Matlab. The price of Matlab is high, but certainly not prohibitive. R is
great and free, but maybe less comfortable to use than Matlab.
 
Finally, after all, I have the impression that in many job offerings in
the financial industry R is much less often mentioned than Matlab.
 
I would very much appreciate any comments on my above remarks. I know
there has been some discussions of R vs. Matlab on R-help, but these
could be somewhat out-dated, since both languages are evolving quite
quickly.
 
With many thanks and best regards,
Stefan Albrecht
 
 

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