R
A language and environment for statistical computing.
R is a language and environment designed for statistical computing and graphics. It descends from the earlier S language developed at Bell Labs, with substantial extensions: a free implementation, a much larger package ecosystem (CRAN), and better support for non-statisticians who use R for data analysis. R's model is interactive and exploratory — read data into a data frame, summarise, plot, fit a model — and the language is designed around making that workflow comfortable.
The R Core Team has maintained R since 1997, after Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman released the first public version from the University of Auckland in 1995. CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, hosts more than 20,000 packages covering everything from time-series analysis to genomics. The Tidyverse collection (ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, and others) has become the de facto modern dialect for many users.
R is the dominant language for academic statistics, biomedical research (especially through Bioconductor), and a substantial share of applied econometrics and clinical trials work. Posit (formerly RStudio) develops the most popular IDE for R and several major Tidyverse packages.
Install
Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install r-base Fedora/RHEL: sudo dnf install R Arch: sudo pacman -S r macOS: brew install r
Authors
- R Core Team