I received a press release announcing that REvolution Computing, a provider of software and support for the open source “R” statistical programming language had appointed R co-creator, Robert Gentleman, to its board of directors. The press release was a great impetus for me to look at R again.
For background about R, Ashlee Vance wrote:

A Garbage Collector must do two things:-
1.Detect garbage objects2.Deallocate the memory of garbage objects and make it available for the program.
There are four approaches that a garbage collector may adopt to detect the garbage objects.