@rod At Work

The R programming language is a GNU open-source project designed for statistical analysis of data. It supports a huge number of extensions in user-created packages that give it a bewildering versatility.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_programming_language

Although I can sympathise with PHYData DBA I reckon that it is important to take R seriously, whatever else you use as well. Not only is it valuable purely for analysis of variance and factor analysis but it is widely used in universities for the teaching of parametric statistics. There are a huge number of resources, Books, samples and videos around. It isn't going away!