What is special about R for corporate finance?

I believe that in the next 5 years, R will prove to be a break through technology for corporate finance.

R is an open source software environment widely used by statisticians, data miners, market makers, and academics. The corporate finance world is lagging behind these groups in adopting R for analysis and reporting.

R Wikipedia

What is special about R? R is

1. Open source

The only implementation cost is training. There is a large community of smart people making useful packages available to the public for free and easy download. These network effects will continue to quickly increase the utility of R.

2. Well designed

R uses a high level programming language (S) that makes the retrieval, analysis, and visualization of data extremely efficient. This empowers users to develop programs to perform complex reports faster than with any other software environment.

In the coming posts, I will go into greater detail on how to implement R, and the implications of the software for the profession.