The History of R Language

 R Language is originated from S. S is a statistical programming language that was developed in the 1970s by John Chambers at Bells Lab.

  • The first version of R was initially developed in the 1990s by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland. They have talked about their experience in developing R is documented in the JCGS paper published in 1996.
  • The first announcement of R publicly was made in 1993.
  • Martin Machler convinced Robert and Ross to make R a free software by using GNU General Public License in 1995.
  • In 1997 R core group was formed. They are used to control the source code of R.
  • CRAN(Comprehensive R Archive Network) was also made in 1997 which helped to network the resources related to R.
  • R version 1.0.0 was released in February 2000.
  • R language became popular in 2009 among analysts when it was covered by New York Times.
  • R Studio was released in 2011 which made writing R code easier. It has more than 15000 packages which make Analysis quite easy.
  • R version 4.1.1 is the latest version of R which has been released in August 2021.