Drenched with heaps and heaps of data, some smart folks thought of making use of them. And how do they use? In the process of trying to understand and use the data, there were these other smart guys who fried their brains out to help get meaning out of such data.
As the process of finding meaning of data evolved, these nerds playing with heaps and heaps of data gave it a fancy name "Statistical Analysis".
And then there were these smart dudes Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman who created a programming language called R.
And then there were these smart dudes Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman who created a programming language called R.
"R"?
Why is it called so? Perhaps they were too busy to use it than worry about finding the perrrrrfect name and hence got left ambiguous. They had a play on words. Both the dude's names initials was R. It was an implementation of an already existing statistical programming language called "S" and influenced by Scheme, another functional programming language.
So the question that follows immediately is "What it?"
It is a programming language for statisticians
It is a programming language for analysts
It is written majorly in R itself. Wait! What? Yeah, and some parts in C and Fortran
It can be extended for newer computations by adding packages
It is open source. Oh! so is it free? Yes
....and it is the best awesome "do anything" calculator software
There are various geeks in the academic class such as colleges and universities who use R extensively. It has a drawback of having a very simple interface....aargh! the boring command line again! And yet, it has been gaining popularity to such a level that it is giving good competition to other commercial software packages like SPSS, SAS, etc. I don't know anything about SAS, is it even an abbreviation? I am not interested for now. I have met SPSS briefly in a kind of introduction which goes like "Hey meet SPSS, she is cool". But she is also way off my purview now.
At present, it's R and I have full access to her! But for now, this is just to begin with. Next, we will get to know R more personally.
Note: Thanks to Ajay Ohri for some corrections here.
