well, it depends on who you call finance people. i am a finance professor, and i use R for my own work these days. two of my colleagues are using S on occasion, S being "close enough" IMHO.
how about students? I am also writing an introductory finance text book, which is currently freely available from my website (http://welch.som.yale.edu/book/). all the figures will eventually be done in R (at the moment, some are still in gnuplot), the book will say so, and i will provide the code for it. the statistical analysis is done in R, but much of it is not shown (it is just an intro text book). hopefully, this will get more finance students asking "what is this program? how can i use it? etc."
but R has also huge drawbacks. most importantly, there is no good *current* textbook for an intro R user. that is, not for the fancy statistical techniques, but lots about data manipulation, plots, linear regression, heteroskedasticity and related (white-like) corrections, programming, "cookbook" (ala perl cookbook---more about the simple stuff: how to delete or insert a row, how to delete or insert a column, typical problems, especially when doing IO). so, honestly, i cannot recommend R to my finance students right now. this mailing list---wonderful as it is [though sometimes "grumpy"]---cannot be a substitute for such an intro R textbook. i cannot ask 300 students to use it as their support hotline. i am afraid that if R becomes more successful, this mailing list will be overwhelmed. the 10-30 people in the know who donate their time to help here just cannot do it. we definitely do need this R textbook. and, though I love the first parts of Ripley&Venables, they want it to be a "stats book in R", not a book about R. (witness brian ripley's annoyed reaction everytime i tried to suggest elaborations on the first part, or them writing another book.)
one more big problem: the name "R". I cannot easily specify to do a comprehensive google search on subject matter "insert and R". A single letter like R just does not connect well with google. this is of course steeped in too much history, but a name change would help---calling it some random 6-letter combination.
regards,
/ivo welch
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