Ihaka and Gentleman first shared binaries of R on the data archive StatLib and the s-news mailing list in August 1993. The name of the language comes from being an S language successor and the shared first letter of the authors, Ross and Robert.

The language took heavy inspiration from the S programming language with most S programs able to run unaltered in R as well as from Scheme's lexical scoping allowing for local variables. R was started by professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman as a programming language to teach introductory statistics at the University of Auckland.

Multiple third-party graphical user interfaces are also available, such as RStudio, an integrated development environment, and Jupyter, a notebook interface. Precompiled executables are provided for various operating systems. It is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R itself (partially self-hosting). The official R software environment is an open-source free software environment within the GNU package, available under the GNU General Public License. As of April 2023, R ranks 16th in the TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity, in which the language peaked in 8th place in August 2020.

Users have created packages to augment the functions of the R language.Īccording to user surveys and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming languages in data mining. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinformaticians and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

Rstudio python support