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