> "R" is a piece of [] compared to other stat packages like SPSS and SAS Do any name-brand quant shops use SPSS and SAS, in preference to R, Julia, Matlab, Mathematica?
Not that I'm aware of. I think that's what my girlfriend used in her "Stats for Psychology majors" class.
C/C++ are going to be alive for a long time in this industry. You need to interact directly with the kernel for drivers in C and you also need to write code that is deterministic for real-time trading applications, meaning you can't just have the GC decide to envoke itself in a way you didn't anticipate. There are ways to control/limit the GC's behavior, but it's still just not how it's done.
This applies only to high frequency trading where nanoseconds count. For systems with average-time-in-trade of minutes or hours, there's no advantage to using C++. C# and Java are more than sufficient IMHO.