December 2017
Beginner to intermediate
470 pages
12h 29m
English
Content preview from R Programming By Example
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The inspiration for R – the S language
R was inspired by the S statistical language developed by John Chambers at AT&T. The name S is an allusion to another one-letter-name programming language also developed at AT&T, the famous C language. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman in the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland in 1991.
The general S philosophy sets the stage for the design of the R language itself, which many programmers coming from other programming languages find somewhat odd and confusing. In particular, it's important to realize that S was developed to make data analysis as easy as possible.
"We wanted users to be able to begin in an interactive environment, where they did not consciously think ...