R began as a teaching tool in Auckland and became a data science workhorse
Two statistics professors in New Zealand wanted a better way to teach their introductory course. They named their language R, partly after their own first initials, Ross and Robert. Its package archive started with twelve contributions; by mid-2025 it held more than 22,000.
Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman created R at the University of Auckland, basing it on an older statistics language called S, so closely that most S programs run in R unchanged. The single letter nods both to S and to the pair's shared initial. They also borrowed lexical scoping from the Scheme language, which lets functions keep their own local variables. In August 1993 they posted a binary on the StatLib archive and announced it on an S mailing list. It became a GNU project with version 0.60 in December 1997, and version 1.0 arrived on 29 February 2000.
R is free, open-source software written mainly in C, Fortran and R itself. At heart it is an interpreted language driven from a command line, though many users work through the RStudio environment or Jupyter notebooks. Its assignment operator is a distinctive arrow made of a less-than sign and a hyphen, and since version 4.1.0 it has had a built-in pipe for chaining functions together, along with a compact shorthand for writing anonymous functions.
The real engine of its popularity is its package ecosystem. The Comprehensive R Archive Network, founded in 1997 by Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch and modelled on similar archives for TeX and Perl, began with three mirror sites and twelve contributed packages; by 30 June 2025 it had 90 mirrors and 22,390 packages. The tidyverse collection streamlines transforming and plotting data, while the Bioconductor project serves genomics researchers.
A small group, the R Core Team, has maintained the source code since 1997, and in 2026 it received the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics. A foundation provides money, and a consortium under the Linux Foundation builds infrastructure. The community runs its own journal and gatherings such as the annual useR! conference and R-Ladies, which promotes gender diversity.
Source: R (programming language)
