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 “Forty 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 “<-” 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
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! 😃
© 2020 Tatjana Kecojevic