A Short History of R

Author

Schwab

A short history of R.

See this site for a longer history with fewer pictures.

Before R there was S

“S is a language that was developed [in 1976] by John Chambers and others at the old Bell Telephone Laboratories”

S got bought and sold

TIBCO is the owner of S

Here’s a book on S

1996-2000 R is released for free

Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the university of Auckland Developed it.

Ross Ihaka

Robert Gentleman

Why is it called R?

CRAN

Comprehensive R Archive Network

They manage all R updates and R packages. There are currently 19897 packages.

They put on the UseR! conference

There’s an R magazine

This is the CRAN team

The tidyverse

Hadley Wickham and others made it.

Who makes RStudio?

  • Started in 2009 as RStudio

  • The tidyverse comes out in 2016

  • Renamed Posit last year.

  • Offers Python Support

Some Credits

  • Photo of John Chambers taken from Stanford’s website.

  • Photo of Ross Ihaka - Photo by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner from Wellington, New Zealand - Ross Ihaka, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37005667

  • Photo by Aneesulrehman - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89993843

  • Photo by By Hadley Wickham - Private correspondence, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46810731

  • Most of the details of this short history came from chapter 2 of Roger Peng’s R Programming for Data Science.

  • https://bookdown.org/rdpeng/rprogdatascience/history-and-overview-of-r.html