R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. Users have created packages to augment the functions of the R language.
According to surveys like Rexer's Annual Data Miner Survey and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming language used in data mining.[citation needed] As of February 2022, R ranks 13th in the TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity.
The official R software environment is an open-source free software environment within the GNU package, available under the GNU General Public License. It is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R itself (partially self-hosting). Precompiled executables are provided for various operating systems. R has a command line interface. Multiple third-party graphical user interfaces are also available, such as RStudio, an integrated development environment, and Jupyter, a notebook interface.
R is an open-source implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics from Scheme, which allow 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.
