My company uses R, Shiny, and Rserve for nearly everything. R is a great programing language - if you need to quickly and efficiently develop stat's based features for medium sized data.

R excels (get it?) at creating reproducible, fault tolerant, consistent functions that can be automated, packaged, applied to a variety of data types, and then extended later.

Our web-stack is Shiny on AWS and we call our API's built in R (ML, images, data, etc) from Android using Rserve.

A lot of the (programing?) criticisms of R will be 'solved' or become non-issues in the next few years. Multithreading, implicit vectorization, better memory handling, gpu functions, among other things are all in the pipe :) (That said, the syntax _is_ a little weird to get use to)

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* We're hiring for very senior positions in data-science and more general R programers. Contact me if you're interested (JasonCEC [at] Gastrograph.com)

[edited for spelling]