The R Inferno

R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinformaticians and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. Users have created packages to augment the functions of the R language.

According to user surveys and studies of scholarly literature databases, R is one of the most commonly used programming languages in data mining. As of December 2022, R ranks 11th in the TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity, in which the language peaked in 8th place in August 2020.

The official R software environment is an open-source free software environment within the GNU package, available under the GNU General Public License. It is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R itself (partially self-hosting). Precompiled executables are provided for various operating systems. R has a command line interface. Multiple third-party graphical user interfaces are also available, such as RStudio, an integrated development environment, and Jupyter, a notebook interface.