PRDV420: Introduction to R Programming

R is an open-source implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics from Scheme, which allows objects to be defined in predetermined blocks rather than the entirety of the code. S was created by Rick Becker, John Chambers, Doug Dunn, Jean McRae, and Judy Schilling at Bell Labs around 1976. Designed for statistical analysis, the language is an interpreted language whose code could be directly run without a compiler. Many programs written for S run unaltered in R. As a dialect of the Lisp language, Scheme was created by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. at MIT around 1975.

In 1991, statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, embarked on an S implementation. It was named partly after the first names of the first two R authors, and partly as a play on the name of S. They began publicizing it on the data archive StatLib and the s-news mailing list in August 1993. In 1995, statistician Martin Mächler convinced Ihaka and Gentleman to make R a free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. The first official release came in June 1995. The first official "stable beta" version (v1.0) was released on 29 February 2000.

The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) was officially announced on 23 April 1997. CRAN stores R's executable files, source code, documentation, as well as packages contributed by users. CRAN originally had three mirrors and 12 contributed packages. As of January 2022, it has 101 mirrors and 18,728 contributed packages.

The R Core Team was formed in 1997 to develop the language further. As of January 2022, it consists of Chambers, Gentleman, Ihaka, and Mächler, plus statisticians Douglas Bates, Peter Dalgaard, Kurt Hornik, Michael Lawrence, Friedrich Leisch, Uwe Ligges, Thomas Lumley, Sebastian Meyer, Paul Murrell, Martyn Plummer, Brian Ripley, Deepayan Sarkar, Duncan Temple Lang, Luke Tierney, and Simon Urbanek, as well as computer scientist Tomas Kalibera. Stefano Iacus, Guido Masarotto, Heiner Schwarte, Seth Falcon, Martin Morgan, and Duncan Murdoch were members. In April 2003, the R Foundation was founded as a non-profit organization to provide further support for the R project.