A The story of R

Note: appendices are labeled with letters.

A very complete history of R was written by Roger D. Peng that includes a history of its ancestors S and S-Plus and available on the web version54 of his book (Peng (2016)) as well as a 16min video55 detailing the creation of S and then R.

S is a statistical programming language developed primarily by John Chambers and (in earlier versions) Rick Becker and Allan Wilks of Bell Laboratories. The aim of the language, as expressed by John Chambers, is “to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully”.

R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.R was developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman. The reoprted their experience developing R in 1996 (Ihaka and Gentleman (1996).)

References

Ihaka, Ross, and Robert Gentleman. 1996. “R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 5 (3): 299–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/10618600.1996.10474713.
Peng, Roger D. 2016. R Programming for Data Science. Leanpub. https://bookdown.org/rdpeng/rprogdatascience/.

  1. https://bookdown.org/rdpeng/rprogdatascience/history-and-overview-of-r.html↩︎

  2. https://youtu.be/STihTnVSZnI↩︎

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