R is a programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 and software environment for statistical

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians for developing statistical software, and R is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis.

R is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. S was created by John Chambers

John Chambers (programmer)

John M. Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S...

 while at Bell Labs.