![]() Now you have a processed data set and you can continue working with it. R is a command line based tool so I wasn’t that surprised when I started up the program and got a window with a command prompt: I downloaded the Mac version of R from the main project site. If you understand the problem well enough to explain it to a computer, then by definition you understand the problem. I’m a firm believer in letting machines do the grunt work of mathematics. I teach undergraduate math and occasionally blog about math education so math software is a particular interest of mine. ![]() I’ve been looking forward to this for some time. The source code is also freely available so you can compile it for any platform you like. R is free and available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The name R is not just a play on the name S, but is also a tribute to the original developers, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, who were known at university as “R & R”. Currently it’s being maintained by the R Development Core Team, with contributors from all over the world. In the early 90’s, researchers at the University of Auckland, New Zealand developed a new version of S that they called R. But I really like ‘Bell Labs: Smart But Terse’.” “How about ‘Bell Labs: We Don’t Have Time For This’?” It was standard practice at the time to give programming languages single letter names. This was always annoying and occasionally painful, but there were no good alternatives until the mid-70’s, when researchers at Bell Labs developed the programming language ‘S’. (FORTRAN was my first programming language back in 1977. Assuming you didn’t have any typos, you got a printout of the results. You wrote your code, submitted it to the mainframe, which compiled and ran it. It wasn’t what you might call ‘interactive’. In the Olden Days (™), if you wanted a computer to do your math homework, you had to use FORTRAN. Once again, this is what you get when programmers write your sales materials – nothing but facts.
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