History
Was the R language designed by statisticians?
Yes.
Card 1 of 259. Answer: Yes.
Yes.
Card 1 of 259. Answer: Yes.
About · Quizzes · History of AI · To suggest new questions or report an error send me a dm.
Yes. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, two statisticians at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, starting in the early 1990s. R is a free language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.
They based its syntax on S, the statistics language John Chambers and colleagues developed at Bell Labs from 1976, and its internals on Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. The name is a nod to S and to the authors' first names. They announced R in 1993, released it under the GNU GPL in 1995, described it in a 1996 Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics paper, and shipped version 1.0.0 on 29 February 2000.
The statistics-first design shows: vectors are the basic data type, missing values (NA) are built in, and data frames and model formulas like y ~ x1 + x2 are native. Interviewers may ask about R versus Python: R is strongest for statistical modeling and visualization through CRAN packages, while Python dominates production machine learning.