a little about the history of R

R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing… and blah blah blah. You probably already know all that. But do you know how it all started? How did the R come to life? I took this text from a post I wrote on this blog, and brought it here. Why? Because the guys are using R without knowing its history. Enough of that.

Now for the story of one of the best programming languages.

can you imagine?

Decades ago, a statistics teacher usually explored a couple of statistical software packages to analyze data and make some progress with his research. During classes, teaching each student how to use them became an arduous task. New software versioning would make the results obsolete. The lack of reproducibility was inevitable as the new software was about to be released in the upcoming years. The non open source software already available on the market, in turn, was expensive and, therefore, most students would hardly have access to the appropriate tool after completing the course.

there is more!

The question is: How to work with such software given the financial conditions of the students as soon as they leave college? Who to buy permissions and licenses from? Well, that was a keen motivation for Ihaka and Gentleman (1996), two professors from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) who faced this uncomfortable scenario. Coincidence or not, in 1993 Ross had access to a book called the New S language, which brought him an unusual idea.

new S?!

Based on the ideas of the S language, the two teachers produced their own computer language to teach classes on Statistics, and gave it the name R (which mentions the name of its creators and also makes reference to the language S that originated the R).

According to Fox (2009), in the beginning, the R was only distributed among students who, after classes, took copies of the newly created software home. However, these copies were being passed on between students and students to the community, increasing the interest of several users on the language. Until, in july 1995, Ross and Robert began to disseminate the R software publicly, since a new programming language had emerged, making it available on the university server. The success of R was so great that after 2 years the language had worldwide visibility and aroused the interest of many developers, including John Chambers, one of the creators and creators of the S language.

and these days?

In recent years, R has become the darling of many companies, especially tech giants like Facebook and Google, attracted by the advantages of R over other software, such as cost, speed and open source, in addition to the excellent functionalities for statistical analysis. Interestingly today, the language is in the top 3 of the most used languages by data scientists and, certainly, it is one of the most used among students of statistics, engineering, economics, epidemiology, medicine and related areas.

I see ya in the next post, or on twitter.

References

Fox, John. 2009. “Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project.” The R Journal 1 (2): 5–13.

Ihaka, Ross, and Robert Gentleman. 1996. “R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics.” Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 5 (3): 299–314.