This week’s word is actually a letter. R is a statistical computing and programming language and program, a derivative of the commercial S-PLUS program, which, in turn, was an offshoot of S from Bell Labs. R is open source, free, and is now on a par with SAS and SPSS in the world of statistical computing (although it does not have much in the way of GUI’s, and lacks the investment that the commercial programs have made in vertical markets and domain-centric solutions).
