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R: pirates Actually, there was an earlier language named S, for "statistics". R was intended as a successor to S - I suppose T would have been the natural nam
by madcaptenor 3y ago
R: pirates
Actually, there was an earlier language named S, for "statistics". R was intended as a successor to S - I suppose T would have been the natural name, then, or S++ - but also the inventors had first names starting with R.
I've heard people speculate it has something to do with correlation coefficients, which it doesn't, but that r comes from "reversion" or "regression": https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/368224/why-is-r-used-to-denote-correlation https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/368224/why-is-r-us...
- mjhay 3y ago"R" wound up being a terrible name in terms of Google-ability and such, although it can be excused given that it was created in 1993. Csharp and Fsharp have no such excuse, though.
- bluenose69 3y agoIn their paper (1), the authors state that R is to relate to S, but also to, in their words, "part to celebrate our own efforts". (Note their first names!). It's a great paper, by the way. 1. Ihaka, Ross, and Robert Gentleman. “R: A Language for Data Analysis and Graphics.” Journal of Computational & Graphical Statistics 5, no. 3 (1996): 299–314.
- madcaptenor 3y agoI haven’t actually read it! I had assumed that they named it R and just left other people to notice that their names started with R, but no such false modesty for them.