Hi Samuel- I've used both R and MATLAB in an energy risk consulting
environment and I like both a lot. My personal preference is R, simply
because I really like the syntax and the ease with which you can work
with multiple data types. It's an easy syntax to figure out; it's a very
powerful and easily extensible program; and its plotting capabilities
are easy to use once you get the hang of it. (I actually prefer R's 3-D
graphing capabilities to MATLAB's, if only because of the extremely fine
level of control that you can exert over plots and the exceptional
graphing power of packages like "lattice"; the only problem with the
plotting system is that as far as I know, it was originally encoded in
FORTRAN and as a result is pretty archaic.) And there's no getting
around the fact that R is free while MATLAB requires you to sign over
your firstborn, an arm, a leg, and a lung.

The problem with R is that in its base form it's not production-grade
software in the way that MATLAB is. What I mean by this is that R isn't
the kind of software that you can use, develop a program, and then leave
it at a client. You can do that with MATLAB.

However, the REvolution enhancements give it a lot of additional power
and make it into software that's actually commercially viable. I also
know for a fact that the old Constellation Energy Group's trading arm in
London uses (or used) R as the backbone of their trading platform back
in the day. Speaking personally, I think that if you can get the right
combinations of libraries and packages together from the right sources
(because not all R package are created equal), you can create a viable
commercial-grade software platform using R.

Regards,

Sarbo

On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 15:08 +0200, Samuel.Meichtry@bkw-fmb.ch wrote: 

> Hello everyone,
> 
> At the moment we are trying to decide which software to use for quantitative analysis and the following Link about performance doesn't really vote for R (http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/dave/rmbenchmark.php).
> 
> I am not against Matlab and cannot say anything about its convenience because I haven't worked with it for a long time. On the other hand Matlab is already heavily used in other departments in our company and we have to tell our project committee why we would like to use R instead.
> 
> Now I am very interested to know why you are using R in your business and not Matlab?
> Or do you use both of them?
> 
> Thank you very much for your feedback!
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> Samuel Meichtry
> 
> 
> ____________________________________________
> BKW FMB Energie AG
> Energy Trading
> Samuel Meichtry
> Analyst Energy Trading
> Tel +41 31 330 53 99
> Fax +41 31 330 56 16
> e-mail samuel.meichtry@bkw-fmb.ch
> 
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> 
> 
> 
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