…whatever otherwise R-fanboys might say.

functional R is (much) worse

Similar The base functions are old school (in a bad way).
attributes of symbols
Graphics No 3D graphics
promisses Lazy evaluation very good!
Different Language design universal ggplot2
Lots of new packages are proposed
Named arguments (many a niche domain) lattice based on Trellis
S3 Objects Personal impressions
S4 niche vcd
Factors
beanplot
similar to Map, Fold, Select Map, Reduce, Filter The best feature of R!
(Functional) programming Package system
added to R relatively recently Packages Installation and updating is both
interactive and programmable
the others are too hard
use plyr Using functions similar to Map to
alply produce different result types from Many packages Curated
dlply different argument types
sapply Mathematica vs R
etc. base Facilitation of development
tapply
lapplly Package writing facilitation books
mapply
blogs
the finest granularity — there are no scalars
RStudio support
vectors
can behave like Associations can have named elements Language data structures Data manipulations plyr

can have named elements sqldf

convenient if it was not slow for large lists. lists
data.table
can behave like Associations the most similar to Mathematica’s lists
dplyr
list of columns data frames
Data base access DBI
named rows and columns
RMySQL
no high-dimensional sparse arrays sparse matrices r-projects RPostgress
named rows and columns R implementations
R-RevolutionAnalytics
definitely an advantage over The ability to name elements, rows,
Mathematica and columns is a nice feature! H2O
High performance computing
fairly good and straightforward for SIMD SparkR
Parallel programming

base package Automatic report generation data analysis reports

Writing and reporting
R-GUI tests
additional packages
foreach Environments LaTeX
Sweave
My favorite RStudio Reproducible research PDF
I tried ESS since I am a big Emacs
ESS Emacs LyX LaTeX
fan/user — RStudio is much better
Markdown PDF
HTML / Javascript based Numerical algorithms ODE solving knitr
Shiny PDF
Interactive interfaces Numerical integrations
Really great! HTML
Linear algebra
leverages the code reflexion
capabilities of R R-Markdown absolutely great!
Optimization
RStudio support

Integration with Pandoc