Overview of R

Read about R, its history, connections to other languages, and alternatives for statistical computing. You will also learn about various interfaces that can be used to edit and run R code, such as RStudio.

Comparision with Alternatives

R is comparable to popular commercial statistical packages such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata. One difference is that R is available at no charge under a free software license.

In January 2009, the New York Times ran an article charting the growth of R, the reasons for its popularity among data scientists, and the threat it poses to commercial statistical packages such as SAS. In June 2017, data scientist Robert Muenchen published a more in-depth comparison between R and other software packages, "The Popularity of Data Science Software."

R is more procedural than either SAS or SPSS, both of which make heavy use of pre-programmed procedures (called "procs") that are built into the language environment and customized by the parameters of each call. R generally processes data in memory, which limits its usefulness in processing larger files.