In this series, we’ll cover different aspects of the R programming language. This first post will cover a brief introduction to the language.
R is an open-source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and visualization, created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman and released in 1993. It was developed from the S statistical programming language which was created by John Chambers and colleagues at Bell Technologies in 1976. The basic R interface is a command line interface, but there are other GUI options available for download such as RStudio.
Per the R-project,
R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. It includes:
- an effective data handling and storage facility,
- a suite of operators for calculations on arrays, in particular matrices,
- a large, coherent, integrated collection of intermediate tools for data analysis,
- graphical facilities for data analysis and display either on-screen or on hardcopy, and
- a well-developed, simple and effective programming language which includes conditionals, loops, user-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.
R’s abilities can also be extended through packages, which are user created scripts, functions, documentation, etc. that are available for download and use in your local R environment. There are a seemingly overwhelming number of packages available, but there are resources to help you sort them out. RStudio has an article with some of the most useful R packages available and R-bloggers has an introduction to packages as well as a number of tutorials. There are also multiple packages available for text analysis, natural language processing, topic modeling, word clouds, etc. for those who made be interested in R’s use for computing outside of the sciences.
R and its packages are available for download through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). To download, select the geographically closest mirror and then download the appropriate version for your device.
In the next post, we’ll cover important features of the language and I will discuss some of the challenges I have experienced while learning R during the course of the semester.
Sources:
https://www.r-project.org/about.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_(programming_language)