R
R is a programming language and free software environment specifically designed for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphical visualization. It provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques, including linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, and clustering. R is highly extensible through packages and is widely used in academia, research, and industries like finance, healthcare, and bioinformatics.
Developers should learn R when working on data-intensive projects that require advanced statistical analysis, data visualization, or machine learning, especially in fields like data science, bioinformatics, or econometrics. It is ideal for tasks such as exploratory data analysis, creating publication-quality graphs, and building statistical models, as it offers powerful libraries like ggplot2 for visualization and caret for machine learning. R is also valuable for reproducible research through tools like R Markdown and Shiny for interactive web applications.