Being arguably the oldest and consequently the most mature language for statistical operations, R has been used by statisticians all over the world for over 20 years. The precursor to R was the S programming language, written by John Chambers in 1976 in Bell Labs. R, named after the initials of its developers, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, was implemented as an open source equivalent to S while they were at the University of Auckland.
The language has gained immensely in popularity since the early 2000s, averaging between 20% to 30% growth on a year-on-year basis:
The growth of R packages
In 2018, there were more ...
