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R Programming Language – Introduction

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R is an open-source programming language that is widely used as a statistical software and data analysis tool. R generally comes with the Command-line interface. R is available across widely used platforms like Windows, Linux, and macOS. Also, the R programming language is the latest cutting-edge tool.

It was designed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently being developed by the R Development Core Team.

R programming language is an implementation of the S programming language. It also combines with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. Moreover, the project was conceived in 1992, with an initial version released in 1995 and a stable beta version in 2000.

why-R

R Programming Language

What is R Programming Language?

  • R programming is used as a leading tool for machine learning, statistics, and data analysis. Objects, functions, and packages can easily be created by R.
  • It’s a platform-independent language. This means it can be applied to all operating systems.
  • It’s an open-source free language. That means anyone can install it in any organization without purchasing a license.
  • R programming language is not only a statistic package but also allows us to integrate with other languages (C, C++). Thus, you can easily interact with many data sources and statistical packages.
  • The R programming language has a vast community of users and it’s growing day by day.
  • R is currently one of the most requested programming languages in the Data Science job market which makes it the hottest trend nowadays
  • It was designed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently being developed by the R Development Core Team.
  • R programming language is an implementation of the S programming language. It also combines with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. Moreover, the project was conceived in 1992, with an initial version released in 1995 and a stable beta version in 2000.

Why Use R?

  • Statistical Analysis: R is designed for analysis and It provides an extensive collection of graphical and statistical techniques, By making a preferred choice for statisticians and data analysts.
  • Open Source: R is an open – source software, which means it is freely available to anyone. It can be accessble by a vibrant community of users and developers.
  • Data Visulaization : R boasts an array of libraries like ggplot2 that enable the creation of high-quality, customizable data visualizations.
  • Data Manipulation : R offers tools that are for data manipulation and transformation. For example: IT simplifies the process of filtering , summarizing and transforming data.
  • Integration : R can be easily integrate with other programming languages and data sources. IT has connectors to various databases and can be used in conjunction with python, SQL and other tools.
  • Community and Packages: R has vast ecosystem of packages that extend its functionality. There are packages that can help you accomplish needs of analytics.

Features of R Programming Language

  • R Packages: One of the major features of R is it has a wide availability of libraries. R has CRAN(Comprehensive R Archive Network), which is a repository holding more than 10, 0000 packages.
  • Distributed Computing: Distributed computing is a model in which components of a software system are shared among multiple computers to improve efficiency and performance. Two new packages ddR and multidplyr used for distributed programming in R were released in November 2015.

Statistical Features of R

  • Basic Statistics: The most common basic statistics terms are the mean, mode, and median. These are all known as “Measures of Central Tendency.” So using the R language we can measure central tendency very easily.
  • Static graphics: R is rich with facilities for creating and developing interesting static graphics. R contains functionality for many plot types including graphic maps, mosaic plots, biplots, and the list goes on.
  • Probability distributions: Probability distributions play a vital role in statistics and by using R we can easily handle various types of probability distributions such as Binomial Distribution, Normal Distribution, Chi-squared Distribution, and many more.
  • Data analysis: It provides a large, coherent, and integrated collection of tools for data analysis.

Basic R program

Since R is much similar to other widely used languages syntactically, it is easier to code and learn in R. Programs can be written in R in any of the widely used IDE like R Studio, Rattle, Tinn-R, etc. After writing the program save the file with the extension .r. To run the program use the following command on the command line:  

R file_name.r

R




# R program to print Welcome to GFG!
 
# Below line will print "Welcome to GFG!"
cat("Welcome to GFG!")


Output: 

Welcome to GFG!

Advantages of R

  • R is the most comprehensive statistical analysis package. As new technology and concepts often appear first in R.
  • As R programming language is an open source. Thus, you can run R anywhere and at any time.
  • R programming language is suitable for GNU/Linux and Windows operating systems.
  • R programming is cross-platform and runs on any operating system.
  • In R, everyone is welcome to provide new packages, bug fixes, and code enhancements.

Disadvantages of R  

  • In the R programming language, the standard of some packages is less than perfect.
  • Although, R commands give little pressure on memory management. So R programming language may consume all available memory.
  • In R basically, nobody to complain if something doesn’t work.
  • R programming language is much slower than other programming languages such as Python and MATLAB.

Applications of R  

  • We use R for Data Science. It gives us a broad variety of libraries related to statistics. It also provides the environment for statistical computing and design.
  • R is used by many quantitative analysts as its programming tool. Thus, it helps in data importing and cleaning.
  • R is the most prevalent language. So many data analysts and research programmers use it. Hence, it is used as a fundamental tool for finance.
  • Tech giants like Google, Facebook, Bing, Twitter, Accenture, Wipro, and many more using R nowadays.

Conclusion

In conclusion , R programming language has emerged as powerful and versatile too for data analysis, statistical modelling and machine learning. R remains the top choice for data scientists, statisticians and researchers across various domain.



Last Updated : 21 Dec, 2023
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