R (programming language) influenced by S
History
R was started by professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman as a programming language to teach introductory statistics at the University of Auckland. The language took heavy inspiration from the S programming language with most S programs able to run unaltered in R as well as from Scheme's lexical scoping allowing for local variables. The name of the language comes from being an S language successor and the shared first letter of the authors, Ross and Robert. Ihaka and Gentleman first shared binaries of R on the data archive StatLib and the s-news mailing list in August 1993. In June 1995, statistician Martin Mächler convinced Ihaka and Gentleman to make R free and open-source under the GNU General Public License. Mailing lists for the R project began on 1 April 1997 preceding the release of version 0.50. R officially became a GNU project on 5 December 1997 when version 0.60 released. The first official 1.0 version was released on 29 February 2000.The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) was founded in 1997 by Kurt Hornik and Fritz Leisch to host R's source code, executable files, documentation, and user-created packages. Its name and scope mimics the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network and the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. CRAN originally had three mirrors and 12 contributed packages. As of December 2022, it has 103 mirrors and 18,976 contributed packages.The R Core Team was formed in 1997 to further develop the language. As of January 2022, it consists of Chambers, Gentleman, Ihaka, and Mächler, plus statisticians Douglas Bates, Peter Dalgaard, Kurt Hornik, Michael Lawrence, Friedrich Leisch, Uwe Ligges, Thomas Lumley, Sebastian Meyer, Paul Murrell, Martyn Plummer, Brian Ripley, Deepayan Sarkar, Duncan Temple Lang, Luke Tierney, and Simon Urbanek, as well as computer scientist Tomas Kalibera. Stefano Iacus, Guido Masarotto, Heiner Schwarte, Seth Falcon, Martin Morgan, and Duncan Murdoch were members. In April 2003, the R Foundation was founded as a non-profit organization to provide further support for the R project.