When Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman published R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics in 1996, they probably didn't imagine the success the language would achieve between then and now. R was born at the University of Auckland in the early 1990s. In the beginning, it was supposed to be a user-friendly data analysis tool, employed by students to perform their research activities. Nevertheless, the points of strength we will look at in the following paragraphs quickly made it very popular among the wider community of researchers and data analysts, finally reaching the business realm in recent years and being used within major financial institutions.
R language development is currently led by the R core team, which releases updates of the base R language on a regular basis. You can discover more about the bureaucratic side of R by visiting the official R website at https://www.r-project.org/about.html.
