document updated 16 years ago, on Jan 8, 2009

FiveThirtyEight.com uses Stata, but the software is fuckin' expensive ($420-$1100)
the R programming langugae — data mining and statistics galore?
- quick overview of commands
- comparisons with MATLAB
  - one difference with MATLAB is the ability to handle data structures other than matricies (relational table = primitive data type!)
  - language might not be the most modern, but it allows easy integration with custom C code
    - someone recommends the much more modern combination of Python + SciPy + RPy
    - though there are good reasons for some perceived "oddities"
    - comparisons with LabVIEW
      - LabVIEW has better hardware-interface support
      - non-deterministic execution order??? WTF?
        
        thus, people who use LabWindows (a C interface to the LabView hardware-interface code) instead
      - also, you DO NOT want to maintain LabVIEW "code"
  - since Googling for 'R' is so painful, there's the RSeek.org search engine (or this one)