How to Talk to Strangers - ways to leverage connectivity between R and other environments R has certain limitations either introduced by design or historically that are not easy to resolve directly. Among those are lack of support for multi-threading or graphical user interfaces. Often we can find a solution in another system or environment. In this talk we show several possibilities of talking between R and other environments and languages that allow the developer to leverage technologies that are not directly accessible from within R. The interfaces have been simplified in the past such that their use is much easier and ready for wide deployment. We will illustrate some practical examples including writing multi-threaded packages in Java and Objective C for R and embedding R. We will also discuss the practical issues and configurations with respect to those interfaces.