The R Programming Language

[kren.Z]

Anybody familiar with the R programming language? I  just came across an article giving some descriptions of this language and found that implementing this on the server-side would be very beneficial (for one project at least). It's supposedly very proficient in things like data statistics, analysis, etc. However, i have yet to find any benchmarks comparing the speed of  R to something like C in terms of pure number crunching. I was just wondering if anyone has actually done some programming in R ( or just heard of it) and would like to give their thoughts and experience etc..