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What is R?

The description on the main R web page is good, and needn’t be repeated here; it describes a bit about R’s history and technical capabilities. Some things you might want to know about R if you’re encountering it for the first time:

R is (according to the description linked above) “a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics”; you can think of it as a combination of a statistics package and a programming language. R is completely free; you don’t have to pay for it, and you can make any modifications you want to it

R runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and many Unix variants

R is not supported by any commercial enterprise, but it has a very active development community, and there are companies that offer training courses etc.. The manuals are complete (if not always helpful – one of the reasons for this Wiki) and there are many books on it.

R has an enormous number of standard and cutting-edge statistical functions built in, a wide variety of (free) add-in packages that add even more functions, and you can extend it further. Every standard statistical analysis can be done in R.

R is mostly command-line driven (although various graphical interfaces have been developed); this makes it harder to use but allows flexibility and documentation and repetition of analyses.

People use R to analyze data in the fields (alphabetical order) of:

• agriculture
• astrophysics
• climatology
• ecology and environmental science
• econometrics
• electrical engineering
• finance
• genetics and genomics
• geography
• psychology
• social sciences and many more.