Years ago, R was a difficult language to master. The language was confusing and not as structured as the other programming tools. To overcome this major issue, Hadley Wickham developed a collection of packages called tidyverse. The rule of the game changed for the best. Data manipulation become trivial and intuitive. Creating a graph was not so difficult anymore.
The best algorithms for machine learning can be implemented with R. Packages like Keras and TensorFlow allow to create high-end machine learning technique. R also has a package to perform Xgboost, one the best algorithm for Kaggle competition.
R can communicate with the other language. It is possible to call Python, Java, C++ in R. The world of big data is also accessible to R. You can connect R with different databases like Spark or Hadoop.
Finally, R has evolved and allowed parallelizing operation to speed up the computation. In fact, R was criticized for using only one CPU at a time. The parallel package lets you to perform tasks in different cores of the machine
