History of R & Doug Bates Background
This document places R in historical context, tracing its origins from Bell Labs’ S language to the R Core development team, and indexes the Stat 692 lecture notes developed jointly with Doug Bates at UW-Madison.
1. Origins and Evolution of R
R was developed in the late 1980s in New Zealand by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman ⚠️ (colloquially known as R & R). It was built on LISP language concepts adopting the syntax of the S language, created by John Chambers and colleagues at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1970s.
While S was proprietary, limiting distribution, R has been freely available and open source since inception. Since 1997, R has been maintained by the international R Core Development Team. For more background, see About R and R: Past and Future History (Ross Ihaka).
Originally, R ran strictly on terminal interfaces. After various GUI attempts, RStudio (now Posit) was founded in 2008 (public release in 2011), rapidly becoming the standard IDE across scientific computing.
2. Douglas Bates Stat 692 Course Notes
This section indexes Douglas Bates’ GitHub notes for R in Stat 692, taught jointly with Brian Yandell in Fall 2014 and Fall 2015 (as Stat 627) at UW-Madison.
R Fundamentals & Tidyverse
- Course Resources ⚠️
- Data frames and examining structure
- Introduction to the Tidyverse
- The
ggplot2graphics package
Linear Models & Inference
- Simple linear regression
- Formulas for linear models
- ANOVA for multi-factor experiments
- Inference for a regression line
- Density Estimation (
densities.Rmd)
Simulation Studies
Big Data & Scaling
3. Open Source, Philosophy & Data Science Resources
- Open Source World (TED Radio Hour)
- How Open Source and Data Sharing Will Tear Down Walls (Big Think)
- History of Gnu, Linux, Free and Open Source Software (Revolution OS)
- Linus Torvalds: Linux & Git (TED)
- Ben Wellington: I Quant NY (TED Talk)
- Ten Simple Rules for Effective Statistical Practice (Kass et al.)