quite easy to price derivatives with R. I have a degree in finmath from uchicago, where derivative pricing was taught using Matlab and R. But in the last semester we were told - oh yeah when you go out there into the real world and start working for the banks you can’t use civilized tools like R and Matlab. So you have to take this mandatory class on cpp. There once was a guy named stroustrup and this shit here is called a makefile… after graduation i worked for BofA and yes, the quant world is completely C++. But there are small funds (few billion dollars) that do their own shit in R, Haskell, Q/kdb, others. Very doable in R.