I used to prototype in Matlab. One can use Octave as an opensource equivalent to Matlab 6.
After I was introduced to R it took me a while to accept R. My main problem was basically non-existent debugging facility in R. You will need to work out your own tricks. This is much better organized in Matlab.
The main advantage of R is its open source.  You can see every function. And there are thousands of them. Most of them are wrapped C/C++ programs. Almost any econometric and statistical procedure is represented in R.
Now my weapon of choice is R (Matlab is for amateurs 8)

qroach wrote on 01/03/09 at 15:08:44:


I fully agree with you there. It's excellent for prototyping.