R is the only comprehensive, public domain statistical software system. Started in the 1990s, by ~2005 it became the dominant non-proprietary statistical software environment for the development and promulgation of statistical methodology. Its Comprehensive R Analysis Network (CRAN) for user-provided codes has grown exponentially since 2001, now with >3200 add-on packages with >50,000 statistical functionalities; a new package arrives daily. CRAN packages are loaded on-the-fly during R sessions. R/CRAN has ~2 million users (2010) and ~100 instructional books on its use.
R has been rarely used in astronomy, yet its potential to bring advanced methodology to the community is huge. CRAN has, for example, ~100 packages devoted to Bayesian inference and ~110 packages devoted to multivariate clustering and classification. The main difficulty is finding what you want, and understanding what you find, as R is not a didactic environment. Thanks
johnnyhenderson replied
406 weeks ago