print("hello world")[1] "hello world"Hello World
A brief history of the R Language
R itself is first released in February 29, 2000 1 by two statisticians, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland. The two professors’ name both contain “R”, hence the name of the language.
However, R was inspired by a older statistical language called S, which was developed around 1976 at Bell Lab. In fact, you may think R as a modern implementation of S.
The R Core Team was formed in 1997 to further develop the language. This is a panel group in charge of maitaining the language: invent new features, fix bugs, ship new versions, etc.
From its birth R was designed to a language dedicated to interactive data analysis and visualization, in contrast to general purpose languages, say, Python. This means R has “batteries included” when it comes to statistical analysis and visualization, which was made so easy and fun. This is not to say that R is a domain-specific language, but that it is most productive when working with data and not so much when, for example, used to develop a game engine.
Footnotes
So it’s really just 5 years old :) ↩︎