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"They're both designed around completely in-memory arrays, which are passed around by-value with a copy-on-write scheme." True, but that doesn't invalidate my point. The datasets I'm typically working with are quite large 300GB-1TB (I have 2TB ram on my main server). I've tried both R and MATLAB and R has been a disaster. Even to plot say 10 million points on a graph is a pain.
> R is somewhat slower Actually it's MUCH slower, up to a point of being entirely not usable for very large datasets (even ~100GB). True, much of MATLAB speed comes from using highly optimized BLAS (Math Kernel Library by Intel). But not just it. R lacks JIT optimization and numerous attempts to add it were unsuccessful. In fact it's so bad that Ross Ihaka, one of R's creator, proposed to "simply start over and build something better". See http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/simply-start-over-a...
TL;DR don't use R if you work with large datasets