I’m curious why you chose R as an alternative to Matlab instead of Scilab. Scilab is specifically designed to be a free and open source alternative to Matlab.
For my thesis I was writing some test software and when deciding which language to use Matlab was immediately ruled out due to the cost (and also the extra cost for the toolkits I’d need). I instead went with Scilab which now means that anybody wanting to reproduce my results can do so freely.