has anyone used R for non-math projects? it has some very interesting features but i'm not sure how well it would hold up for large projects, complicated data structures, etc.
It has very good support for sparse matrices (package Matrix) and also for serializing big data structures and loading parts in memory sequentially (like SAS). See packages bigMemory, and ff.
Where it's not so strong, of course, is in terms of web frameworks. Nothing that I could find, and, considering the scope of the language, it's allmost unreasonable to expect it.
It is great for drawing vector graphics. It also has capabilities for working with large data sets, as long as you don't do it the naive way (by reading a huge array into memory).
I read here and there that R is not that great handling huge amounts of data, but then I'm puzzled to know that it is widely being used in genetics... Help!
