jfolson

Not really. All packages are bytecode compiled, so unless you doing something stupid, for loops are much faster than they used to be in R.

For me, productivity. For maintaining large projects or building applications, I'd absolutely go with Scala or Python, but I cannot be as productive in other languages. R has performance issues, but once you know it, you can avoid them (see the recent dplyr benchmarks ~2x faster than pandas).