Long, long time ago … I started with Octave and Matlab.They were amazing and allowed me to solve a lot of interesting problems in my research. I loved the command window of Octave, but I needed the productivity an IDE gives when developing complex calculations. None of the available IDE’s for Octave were not as powerful as the Matlab IDE. The problem was that Matlab was not GNU and buying a license was very expensive. Then, I found R and I realized that none Octave neither Matlab were the tool I needed for my research. I needed advanced project and file management through repositories, fast data manipulation, an easy way to export my calculations, a creative way of authoring reports and a powerful IDE that let me access my beloved command window. Now R gives me all I need and is an important part of my everyday toolbox. For those who does not known R, I must say that R is a well known programming language that is widely used on mathematics, economy, biology… Its main benefits includes the ability to work easily with statistics and data manipulation. R is very popular on academics and research, is GNU, very powerful and have a lot of packages that allows do magical things in a few clicks or with a few commands.

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