R

R is a programming language for statistical computing and data visualization. It has been adopted in the fields of data mining, bioinformatics, and data analysis.[8]

The core R language is augmented by a large number of extension packages, containing reusable code, documentation, and sample data.

R software is open-source and free software. It is licensed by the GNU Project and available under the GNU General Public License. It is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R itself. Precompiled executables are provided for various operating systems.

As an interpreted language, R has a native command line interface. Moreover, multiple third-party graphical user interfaces are available, such as RStudio—an integrated development environment—and Jupyter—a notebook interface.

R was started by professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman as a programming language to teach introductory statistics at the University of Auckland.[9] The language was inspired by the S programming language, with most S programs able to run unaltered in R. The language was also inspired by Scheme's lexical scoping, allowing for local variables.

The name of the language, R, comes from being both an S language successor as well as the shared first letter of the authors, Ross and Robert. In August 1993, Ihaka and Gentleman posted a binary of R on StatLib — a data archive website. At the same time, they announced the posting on the s-news mailing list. On December 5, 1997, R became a GNU project when version 0.60 was released. On February 29, 2000, the first official 1.0 version was released.