The name “R” is a play on the names of the two authors of the software package (Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman) as well as an homage to an older statistical software package called “S”. R has become ...The name “R” is a play on the names of the two authors of the software package (Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman) as well as an homage to an older statistical software package called “S”. R has become one of the most popular programming languages for statistical analysis and “data science”. Unlike general-purpose programming languages such as Python or Java, R is purpose-built for statistics.