OverviewHistoryR.pdf

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Overview and History of R

Roger D. Peng, Associate Professor of Biostatistics

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

What is R?

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What is R?

R is a dialect of the S language.

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What is S?

S is a language that was developed by John Chambers and others at Bell Labs.

S was initiated in 1976 as an internal statistical analysis environment—originally implemented as

Fortran libraries.

Early versions of the language did not contain functions for statistical modeling.

In 1988 the system was rewritten in C and began to resemble the system that we have today (this

was Version 3 of the language). The book

Statistical Models in S

by Chambers and Hastie (the

white book) documents the statistical analysis functionality.

Version 4 of the S language was released in 1998 and is the version we use today. The book

Programming with Data

by John Chambers (the green book) documents this version of the

language.

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Historical Notes

In 1993 Bell Labs gave StatSci (now Insightful Corp.) an exclusive license to develop and sell the

S language.

In 2004 Insightful purchased the S language from Lucent for $2 million and is the current owner.

In 2006, Alcatel purchased Lucent Technologies and is now called Alcatel-Lucent.

Insightful sells its implementation of the S language under the product name S-PLUS and has

built a number of fancy features (GUIs, mostly) on top of it—hence the “PLUS”.

In 2008 Insightful is acquired by TIBCO for $25 million

The fundamentals of the S language itself has not changed dramatically since 1998.

In 1998, S won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Software System Award.

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