What is R?

Before there was R, there was S! 🀠

R is a dialect of S language that was developed in 1976 by Rick Becker and John Chambers at the Bell Laboratories.

Rick Becker gave an excellent keynote talk β€œForty Years of S” at the UseR!2016 conference:
Rick Becker @ UseR!2016 where he talked about the development of S language that gives explanations for many characteristics of R as we know it, including β€œ<-” assignment operator.

1993 Bell Labs gave StatSci (later Insightful Corp.) an exclusive licence to develop and sell the S language. Insightful sold its implementation of the S language under the product name S-PLUS.

You can read more about the history of S, R, and S-PLUS

Then, R was born πŸ˜‡πŸŽΆ

In the early nineties at the University of Auckland in the Department of Statistics R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman.

They used GNU General Public License to make R open source free software.

Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. R*: A language for data analysis and graphics.* Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 5(3):299–314, 1996

Currently R is developed by the R Development Core Team, of which John Chambers is a member.

To start using R you need to install it! πŸ˜ƒ


Β© 2020 Tatjana Kecojevic