The packages that were used in statistics were SAS, SPSS and Stata. perl is not a statistical package and has nowhere near the depth of statistical capabilities of R.

Don't forget that I also mentioned the checkpoint package in my post. You only need to know the date for that, not the version of each of the packages.

In your last paragraph I think you are referring more to software development practices than what is available through R. Simply using R or any language doesn't guarantee this.