R is a programing language and free software that is commonly used for statistical purposes by programmers, statisticians, and data miners. It is compatible with various operating systems such as UNIX platforms, Windows, and MacOS. Some statistical purposes include linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, and clustering. Comparing it to other programming languages used for statistical purposes, one of R’s major strength is the ease when it comes to the production of well-designed publication-quality plots such as mathematical symbols and formulas.
R is a dialect of S, a programing language developed by John Chambers in 1976 as an internal statistical analysis environment. Although S serves both users and developers, it had its roots in data analysis and did not come for a traditional programing language background. The focus of R was attempting to make data analysis easier for everyone. However, one of the major limitations of S was it was only available for commercial uses and not for consumers. Thus, R was created in 1991 by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman in the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland. In 1995, the developers of R used the GNU General Public License to make R a free software. This allowed for the source code for the entire R system to be used by everyone. A stable beta version of R was available in 2000.
As of 2019, R currently has more than 10,000 ad-on packages and ranks 12th in the TIOBE Index, a measure of the popularity of programming languages.