R owes its growing popularity to the development of data science. It was created around 1993, but has recently become one of the most popular (if not the most popular) languages for analytics, data mining and advanced statistics. It is an interpreted language based on the earlier S language. The R web site notes: “One of the strengths of R is the ease with which well-designed, publishable graphs can be created, including mathematical symbols and formulas where appropriate.
R is available as open source under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide range of UNIX and similar platforms (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.