The inspiration for R – the S language

R was inspired by the S statistical language developed by John Chambers at AT&T. The name S is an allusion to another one-letter-name programming language also developed at AT&T, the famous C language. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman in the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland in 1991.

The general S philosophy sets the stage for the design of the R language itself, which many programmers coming from other programming languages find somewhat odd and confusing. In particular, it's important to realize that S was developed to make data analysis as easy as possible. 

"We wanted users to be able to begin in an interactive environment, where they did not consciously think of programming. Then as their needs became clearer and their sophistication increased, they should be able to slide gradually into programming, when the language and system aspects would become more important."

– John Chambers

The key part here is the transition from analyst to developer. They wanted to build a language that could easily service both types of users. They wanted to build language that would be suitable for interactive data analysis through a command line but which could also be used to program complex systems, like traditional programming languages.

It's no coincidence that this book is structured that way. We will start doing data analysis first, and we will gradually move toward developing a full and complex system for information retrieval with a web application on top.