Talk:R (programming language)/Archive 2

I undid the deletion of material I added on Nov 3. This was an edit made in good faith. However, I'm a novice wikipedia editor, and I see MrOllie's POV about the appearance of COI. I removed the portion of the added material that might be viewed as a COI - the rest should be fine. I also reduced the number of citations to 3, and modified one of them to point to a more independent source (Java Developers Journal). Full disclosure: I am an author on one of the cited papers, but I have no connection to the other 2. While making this update, I also added some wiki-links to other terms used in these sentences. Do other people think that this material is fine now?Karl (talk) 16:07, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Please give me some guidance -- I just feel bullied.

I'm a novice wikipedia author, but this is discouraging and just seems wrong. I made a thoughtful edit, in good faith, trying to address the other wikipedian's point, and left a detailed comment on the talk page describing my edit and reasoning. However, the other person just removed my material with no comment on this TALK page. The person's edit summary was "rv COI rexeranalytics stuff".

I tried to address the COI in my discussion on this TALK page. I'd like to point out that the person removed my whole sentence, and all 3 references, not just the one reference that I am an author on.

This same person is removing other material I've been adding to other pages, with no discussion on the TALK pages, even when the material I've added has nothing to do with me (so no COI). See e.g., SIGKDD, and my request for explanation and coaching on Talk:SIGKDD. I had some time this week, and so I thought I'd try to give back some to the data mining community by helping to improve the wikipedia material on a number of pages……but this is just discouraging. I'm new to wikipedia, can others help suggest what I should do? I'm not sure what the comity conventions are, but I thought people would be open to working with me and would provide constructive feedback if they didn't like my edits. I have a PhD, and have been working in data mining / analytics for 20 years, so those are the areas I'm trying to contribute to (see User:Krexer. But now I just feel bullied and discouraged from contributing to wikipedia again.Karl (talk) 20:17, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I think the COI reversion was okay, although handled poorly. Because of your COI the deletion should be handled with talk page discussion, and other editors can then insert the material after discussion to remove the COI. Yes, the data mining, cyberinfrastructure pages on Wikipedia are a nightmare, your edits are welcome. Constructive feedback and assistance is the way to go, it does not always happen, though. Please feel free to post the deleted material on this page, and I will look it over. -Fjozk (talk) 20:58, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Good point, and I like your suggested strategy: Due to my COI (being an author of one of the 3 sources I propose citing), I will post the material here in the talk page, and other people knowledgeable in this topic area can decide whether or not they want to insert some or all of it into the R (programming language) page. Here are the two sentences that I propose adding to the end of the first paragraph:

Polls and surveys of data miners consistently show R to be used by more data miners than any other tool.^[2][3] R's popularity has increased substantially in recent years.^[4][2]

Only references 2-4 are relevant to this edit, but I did not know how to suppress reference #1 from appearing in this list.

Reference one appears in this reflist because it is from elsewhere on this page not in your blurb right above. When you use the reflist template it puts in a list of all references on a page. -Fjozk (talk) 06:54, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you again, Fjozk for suggesting this helpful strategy.

Now, regarding the point about why my edits to other pages are being deleted: It appears that my COI on this page is causing one editor to track all of my edits to other pages (e.g, SIGKDD) and remove my contributions (claiming that every edit I make has COI, without trying to evaluate whether there is really COI -- or sometimes my material is just removed with no explanation). I am a novice wikipedia author, and recognize that a few of my early edits had COI. A couple friendly editors, such as yourself, have pointed out wikipedia guidelines on COI, and talk page conventions. I am now trying to follow these. However, many of my edits have nothing to do with COI (e.g, SIGKDD). I have tried to start a discussion of my proposed edits on Talk:SIGKDD, but have gotten no response. Maybe I just need to wait - there's no hurry. What do you suggest?Karl (talk) 06:44, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, take a breather. With a single-minded editor like this, who thinks they have latched onto something pernicious, and may be at en.wiki more for socializing than creating content, but one who is also way over his head knowledge wise, it can be tricky. The SIGKDD article is seriously hideous. Would it be possible to improve the whole article, if I help with the COI editor? It's not the highest priority, though, as the cyberinfrastructure and HPC articles need work more, but, it would be nice. -Fjozk (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 06:48, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

regarding the SIGKDD entry, I could reach out to Gregory, one of the founders of the SIG and the original KDD conferences in the 90s (I periodically correspond with him). He could probably provide some historical info and other material on the SIG, as well as current info. I can then see if a few of us can help insert some of this material into the wikipedia SIGKDD entry. If there are concerns that the material is COI or not properly notable, I could enter it into the talk page first, so others could evaluate it.Karl (talk) 07:25, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

No, we have to use reliable tertiary sources. I document cyberinfrastructures, and, when I get my meeting with the founder or the chairman or the CEO, I know to stop paying attention when they start talking. I know my comments are bad, but I just finished some excellent documentation of a new pipeline, and every one on the team is complimenting me on it; and I did it because I avoided the CEO like the plague. In addition, primary research will lead to issues and more work than just finding secondary or tertiary sources, because we will have to back up every statement he makes with exhaustive literature searches. Better to find and use only reliable references as defined already by Wikipedia. -Fjozk (talk) 07:36, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Great point about avoiding a chairman or CEO for most things. Thanks.Karl (talk) 14:36, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree that there has been an increase in R's popularity, so added that sentence and added the reference Bradhill14 (talk) 04:52, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

FYI: Fjozk has been banned indefinitely. GaramondLethe 12:47, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Hello dear editors,

I would like to ask to add r-bloggers.com to the links section: The site has been around for over 2 years, it now includes over 10,000 articles on R, based on the writings of over 450 bloggers, with over 12,000 readers (and over 20K visits per day). It is mentioned in many websites across the web, and also in several books on R.

However, since I am its founder, I have a conflict of interest, and would like others to give me feedback on rather or not it is a good fit to the article at this point.

With regards, Tal Galili (talk) 21:39, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Dear editors, I took the liberty and added the following link:

• R-bloggers, a daily news site about R, with 10,000+ articles, tutorials and case-studies, contributed by over 450 R bloggers.

Please let me know if you have any reservations. Thanks, Tal Galili (talk) 12:16, 1 March 2013 (UTC)

Some recommendation based on lecture slides from Ross Ihaka (note that these slides may change in the future):

The article uses `<-` as the assignment operator.

"The `=` assignment form is preferred to the `<-` one." (Slide 15 http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~stat782/downloads/01-Basics.pdf)

<<< Actually, this is totally inconsistent with what other sources claim! See, for example, Google R coding standards: http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-r-style.html 75.150.66.10 (talk) 21:03, 18 November 2011 (UTC) >>>

The article claims:

> mean(y) # Calculate average (arithmetic mean) of (vector) y; result is scalar

Stating "result is scalar" is misleading because R does not have scalars, only vectors of length 1.

"Every value in R must be stored in a vector... This is true for values which look like scalars such as TRUE, 27.3 and "hello"." (Slide 3 http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~stat782/downloads/10-Efficiency.pdf)

Less important: it is also considered good practice to have spaces between most operators (exceptions being / and ^).

Hence: 2 + 2 (instead of 2+2), c(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) (instead of c(1,2,3,4,5,6)), etc.

Runedot (talk) 09:23, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

On the first point, the "Writing R Extensions" manual (version 2.13.2 (2011-09-30)) gives different advice: "[...] we recommend the consistent use of the preferred assignment operator ‘<-’ (rather than ‘=’) for assignment." --Avenue (talk) 11:57, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

True, purists prefer "<-", and using "=" can get you into trouble. However - the assignment operator "=" was added to comply with the preferences of ordinary users. When it does make a difference, if one uses "<-" or "=", we are already entering fairly "advanced" territory - at least advanced enough that those who venture there know the difference. All the best Þórður Breiðfjörð (talk) 17:48, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the article as written helps explain to new users why pretty much all of the tutorials use <- instead of =. When I first looked at R code, it confused me. Andrew³²⁷ 18:28, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

New to R, I was looking for a very simple example of syntax. Would a short example like this improve the article:

> x <- c(1,2,3,4,5,6)   # Create ordered collection
> y <- x^2              # Square the elements of x
> mean(y)               # Calculate arithmic mean of y 
[1] 15.16667
> var(y)                # Calculate variance (unbiased estimate)

User:Nillerdk (talk) 10:40, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Remember that Wikipedia is not an instruction manual, and that R implements the S language. Perhaps a simple example of the S programming language could be included in that article, but not for tutorial purposes. A link to a tutorial might be permitted. -- Schapel (talk) 18:40, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

A realistic, multiline example would definitely be helpful in this article (as in other programming language articles); "Hello, world" doesn't really tell you much. An example is not the same thing as a tutorial or an instruction manual. For that matter, an overview of the language's syntax and semantics would be useful as well. Of course, it should not be at the level of detail you'd find in a reference manual.

R is indeed largely based on S, and WP shouldn't repeat itself. But for now neither article includes much information about the language(s). We can figure out how to organize it better after we write it.... --macrakis (talk) 21:11, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia is certainly not an instruction manual, but also not a classical printed encyclopedia with very constrained space and no room for examples. And an example of syntax (even "Hello, World") gives the reader (at the very least) a feeling for the language which enabled him/her to understand the more elaborate description in the text better. Can you maybe suggest a better example of syntax than the one I came up with? I think some example should really be there. User:Nillerdk (talk) 23:32, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello, World is not very informative in R:

> "Hello, World"
"Hello, World"

I would submit that some code might suggest how unusual S4 objects are for programing. i.e. Something about how summary is called or plot. PDBailey (talk) 03:16, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

I've added a simple example along those lines. -- Avenue (talk) 02:21, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

We need to split "Features" as noted above. R is a hybrid it is both a collection of statistical packages comparable to SAS or SPSS and a programming language comparable to Fortran, C#, APL or Matlab. As a programming language R is a command line interpreter similar to BASIC or Python, type 2+2 at the prompt and press enter and the computer replies with 4.

   > 2+2
  [1] 4

But, the example is deceptively simple because R implements matrices, so R can from the command line add or even invert matrices without loops. R's data structures include scalars, vectors, matrices, data frames (similar to tables in a relation database) and lists. The R object system has been extended by package authors to define objects for regression models, time-series and geo-spatial coordinates.

R supports functional programming with functions and object oriented programming with generic functions. Jim.Callahan,Orlando (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:48, 5 July 2010 (UTC).

Following the suggestion, I added a third example explaining some of the language syntax in function declaration for R. (talk) 21:51, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Pinging User:Talgalili and User:Mortense.

We need to slim down the external links. Wikipedia:External links notes as a guideline that it is "not Wikipedia's purpose to include a lengthy or comprehensive list of external links related to each topic". At the moment we have seven external links, which are, in order:

1. The official R site;
2. The R wiki;
3. A list of R-related books;
4. An aggregated R news site;
5. Two galleries of graphs;
6. An R-related search engine.

This is...far too much, and some of the sites are unnecessary. The official site is, obviously, fine. The R wiki would seem to fail criteria 12 in WP:ELNO. The list of R-related books doesn't seem to serve a particular purpose, while R-generated graphs should be (indeed, have been) incorporated into the article. The aggregated news site would appear to pass under criteria 4 of the "Sites to consider" section of the EL policy. So, my suggestion is that we limit it to:

1. The official R site;
2. The aggregated news site;
3. The ODP entry for R, which contains a lot of the other links.

Thoughts? Ironholds (talk) 18:21, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. I don't see six as inherently excessive but it's much better to link to a managed external links site. --Northernhenge (talk) 21:59, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

-----------

Hello Ironholds, I'm very happy you are taking this on.

I should first re-iterate that I have a conflict of interest when it comes to r-bloggers. So while I think it should be in the links, I am biased, and need others to give their objective opinion.

As for the other links - I think that the dmoz list of links is relatively out of date, so I do *not* think it is that important to link to (the links and information in this article are much more updated).

I would argue that the r search website (rseek) should be included in the list, because R is a somewhat hard language to search for.

The graph galleries could probably be mentioned inside the article as examples of how R offers a high level of graphics for statistics, I think they are valuable (though they do not have to be in the list of links).

As for the list of books, I think they are easy to find (p.s: rseek vs google)

Best, Tal Galili (talk) 23:27, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

It's not really Wikipedia's job to enable improved google search, however. I'd be interested in including, say, ggplot2 graphs as a way of demonstrating advanced plotting options, but we can always generate those ourselves. What if we partnered link removal with updating the ODP entries to incorporate the links in dispute? Best of both worlds. Ironholds (talk) 23:44, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello Ironholds,

Regarding rseek - it is one of those things that I think are hard for new comers to know about. Do you think it might be worth mentioning in the body of the article? Maybe with just linking to this source: http://www.r-project.org/search.html

?

As for adding ggplot2 plots to the main page, it is a good idea. It might even be worth asking on the ggplot2 forum for help in extending the current two articles (that of R and of ggplot2) - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ggplot2

As for ODP, I do not have permission to edit there, do you?

Cheers,

Tal Galili (talk) 15:42, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, we can submit ODP suggestions :). In regards to rseek, we try to avoid embedding external links in the middle of articles - as a long-time R programmer I've personally never used it, actually (stackoverflow is pretty superior). Ironholds (talk) 20:21, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Hello Ironholds,

o.k., I will go with your plan of action, and I imagine we will probably open this topic again in the future when more editors will be willing to join the discussion.

With regards, Tal Galili (talk) 16:00, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm interested in the history of this. It appears that there's a lot of good information at Reference 1 (R : Past and Future History). Can someone more knowledgeable in this field try to create a history section for this article?--ɱ (talk) 13:35, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

"R functionality has been made accessible from several scripting languages such as Python,[43] Perl,[44] Ruby,[45] and F#.[46] PL/R can be used alongside, or instead of, the PL/pgSQL scripting language in the PostgreSQL and Greenplum database management system."

Is it time to add Julia to the list (scripting language is however an understatement..)? See my last edit there (in the chapter I made). I've never used R or used R from Julia or other way around (both possible). Since I've not tried I do not know how mature/complete the support is. Maybe it just has no bugs and just works. Please if you can comment on that..

PL/R is I think using the whole R language in PostgreSQ, right? Should the wording be changed to something clearer: "R can be used within PostgreSQL database (using PL/R)"? comp.arch (talk) 16:05, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Okay. So...get a citation and add it? And sure, that rewording sounds fine. Ironholds (talk) 00:49, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Shouldn't this be "R programming environment"? We already have an article about the programming language S Btyner 20:11, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

The S language is now more a small family of languages or dialects than a single language, so I think that the "R programming language" is a distinct concept. And the current title does follow the general guideline given in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (languages). However I'm not entirely happy with it either. I would like the title to reflect the statistical emphasis of the language/environment, e.g. "R statistical computing environment". -- Avenue 01:41, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

The full name of R is "The R Project for Statistical Computing." Why not just use the actual name? Abel (talk) 17:49, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Because the convention with programming languages is either $SIMPLE_NAME or $SIMPLE_NAME_(programming_language). Look at C or C++ or, well, S. Ironholds (talk) 18:47, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Added the actual name to the article text with citation. Hopefully that will be good enough, even though that is not really what Avenue was looking for. Abel (talk) 20:06, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

The first sentence now says 'R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics, called "The R Project for Statistical Computing."' I think this is wrong, and that the R Project is distinct from the R language/environment itself. This seems to be supported by the source you cite, which says on page 423 that "R software [...] is available at no cost from the R Project for Statistical Computing". Perhaps the article should say more about the R project, but it shouldn't say the project is the language. --Avenue (talk) 04:17, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

"R programming language" is literally a synonym for "The R Project for Statistical Computing."Abel (talk) 03:03, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Agreed with User:Avenue. The project is the whole effort around the language, not the language itself. A programming language cannot sponsor conferences and a journal...! --Macrakis (talk) 03:57, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

It is common in open-source software development to have an umbrella "project" to coordinate efforts to develop one or more pieces of software. I agree that "R" is the name of the programming language/environment, and "The R Project for Statistical Computing" is the open-source project that develops it. They are not synonymous. - dcljr (talk) 04:48, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

According to the project itself, the language is "R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing" while the project is "R Foundation for Statistical Computing." Abel (talk) 21:26, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

I disagree. The official name of the language is R. The part after the colon merely expands on it to explain what it is, but is not part of the name of the language. Tayste (edits) 00:01, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

In the introduction, it says "R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics". It doesn't say "R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics". Tayste (edits) 00:05, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

To cite R in publications use:

  R Core Team (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical
  computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
  URL http://www.R-project.org/.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing},
    author = {{R Core Team}},
    organization = {R Foundation for Statistical Computing},
    address = {Vienna, Austria},
    year = {2015},
    url = {http://www.R-project.org/},
  }

We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating R, please cite it
when using it for data analysis. See also ‘citation("pkgname")’ for
citing R packages.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Id4abel (talk • contribs) 2015-11-19T13:24:50

Many citation styles (e.g. APA) separate the title and subtitle with a colon. This is a great example where "R" is the title, and "A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing" is the subtitle. Without the subtitle, this citation would show only a 1-character title, which looks odd. +mt 01:17, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Very true. The R Core Team, the people who maintain R, who run the R Foundation for Statistical Computing, say that the name is "R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing" and even tell people to cite "R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing" not "R." The above code is what R itself says we should use as a citation, also "R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing." Abel (talk) 02:19, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Note that phrase, "when using it for data analysis". That citation is clearly intended for authors of academic and technical papers who have used R to analyze and/or visualize their data. It doesn't necessarily mean we should consider that the "actual" name of the software. You started out claiming that "'R programming language' is literally a synonym for 'The R Project for Statistical Computing.'" Now you're saying, "The R Core Team… say that the name is 'R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing'". If you find a third name associated with the software in some other context, will that become its "actual name" in your eyes? Now, granted, if you wanted to point out in the article that the R Core Team asks authors who use R in their publications to cite the software using the title R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, that would technically be correct (finally) — but is it notable anough to include in an encyclopedia article? - dcljr (talk) 06:12, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Originally, I was wrong. I thought the project and the program itself had the same name. It turns out, the project is The R Project for Statistical Computing and the program is R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. I call it R and I imagine that most everyone else calls it R. That does not change the fact that the R Core Team says that the actual name of the program is R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing and that the project is called The R Project for Statistical Computing. Everyone refers to the Wealth of Nations as Wealth of Nations, but that does not change the fact that the actual name is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.Abel (talk) 17:10, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

The name of the program is simply R. The subtitle in the citation is a useful description, but I don't regard the subtitle as part of the program name. If you think otherwise, you will need to build a consensus. +mt 19:55, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Okay, so Wikipedia is not a publication.^[1] Then what exactly is it? Abel (talk) 22:19, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Red herring. - dcljr (talk) 03:37, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Either Wikipedia is a publication in which case we are blatantly ignoring the wishes of the R Core Team, or Wikipedia is not a publication in which case the wishes of the R Core Team concerning publications are not applicable. Abel (talk) 06:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

The R FAQ we're linking to also has specific instructions about citing that document, which we seem to be "ignoring", so I've changed the citation(s) accordingly. The article now mentions the citation the R Core Team requests authors use (quoted above), which I hope will be acceptable to everyone. - dcljr (talk) 09:36, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

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This is not the code that is actually used for the gif.

The correct code is here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mandelbrot_Creation_Animation_(800x600).gif

I fixed it. SChalice 21:57, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Should the code be modified so that Z is explicitly initiated into the 400x400 matrix of complex 0s? I mean it's not unusual for R code to be implicitly cast like it does in this code but it does make it harder to follow along. - Dason, 13:42, 6 March 2017 (EST)

Someone has put a citation needed on the sentence "The following examples illustrate the basic syntax of the language and use of the command-line interface". How can this be fulfilled? --Guyal of Sfere (talk) 19:40, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

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Greetings! Here with a request to add MicroStrategy to the list of commercial commercial software systems in Commercial support for R. I recommend the following go between Microsoft Power BI and Pentaho:

MicroStrategy[1]

Since I am here on behalf of MicroStrategy and have a financial conflict of interest, I will not edit this article directly. Can other editors assist in posting this edit? Happy to answer any questions if needed. Thanks, WWB Too (Talk · COI) 18:38, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

As of 2020-10-27T10:38:02, the "History" section of this article read as follows:

R is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics, inspired by Scheme.^[1] S was created by John Chambers in 1976, while at Bell Labs. There are some important differences, but much of the code written for S runs unaltered.^[2]

R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman^[3] at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is developed by the R Development Core Team (of which, as of August 2018^[update], Chambers was a member).^[4] R is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S.^[5] The project was conceived in 1992, with an initial version released in 1995 and a stable beta version (v1.0) on 29 February 2000.^[6][7][8]

However, Roger Peng (3 September 2020), R Programming for Data Science, Wikidata Q101068131, sec. 2.4, claims it began in 1991.

Also, the current version says it's initial release came in 1995. However, I remember attending a useR! conference in 2007 at which people officially celebrated the 10th anniversary of R. That would have made the official release 1997.

Comments? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 05:29, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

"Started working on" sounds ill-defined. Was it when Ihaka and Gentleman conceived the idea? When they wrote the first line of code? The first usable version? I can see how conflicting dates would end up in the sources. Better to focus on the public releases, I think, as in your recent edits.

As for 1995, the first source (by Ihaka himself) says that binaries were distributed on the s-news mailing list in 1993; 1995 was the first release of the source. I think 1997 was when the "R Core Team" was formed and serious development on what would become R v1.0.0 began, so maybe that's what you celebrated in 2007?

On a related note, there's an article by John Chambers in the latest issue of the R Journal that might be useful for this section: S, R, and Data Science. It covers the development history of S and its relationship with R. For example, he clarifies that he had actually joined the R Core Team by 2000 (so long before 2018!). – Joe (talk) 10:55, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

datasets.load was nominated for deletion in September 2018 and the decision was to merge the content here. That was never done, because shortly after the AfD an anonymous editor removed the AfD-merge template with a misleading edit summary. In the meantime, two years have passed and Bquast (the author of the package) has significantly rewritten the article, so I'm unsure if the 2018 consensus can still holds. Pinging RoySmith, who closed the AfD, for his thoughts.

On a more general note, if the consensus is still to merge, I'm not sure this article is a good target. It currently only mentions a handful of very high-profile packages (e.g. ggplot2) and I think that's the way it should stay: trying to cover even a small subset of the 16,000+ active packages here would severely bloat the article. It's unlikely many R packages (with a few notable exceptions like ggplot2) are independently notable though, so perhaps it's time for a List of R packages where the borderline cases like datasets.load can find a home? – Joe (talk) 07:55, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Joe Roe, Thanks for the ping. Let's see. Yeah, the IP removing the merge tag was bogus. But, two years have passed and consensus can change, and yes, there's been substantial changes to the article since then. So, I can't see insisting that the AfD close still hold sway.

Taking off my "Admin who closed the AfD" hat and putting on my "just plain editor" hat, my personal opinion is that it still makes sense to merge, for the reasons you describe here. Besides, anything you can do in R, you can do better in Python. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:27, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Could you please review the content of the Software repository#Selected repositories table and make any improvements you think are appropriate?

I only know Python well enough to discuss it, and I should update the row for R in that table ... but not today: I don't think R-Forge is used today the way I think it was when I created that table. Many people contributing packages use GitHub with autochecks using Travis-CI. There are relatively new autocheck procedures that I've used, but the documentation of them is out of date. DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:32, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Completed merge to Roy's new page: R package.   Y Merge completed Klbrain (talk) 11:38, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to Joe Roy and Klbrain for the new article on R package.

QUESTION AND MINOR PROBLEM I DON'T KNOW HOW TO FIX: The section on Software repository#Selected repositories includes a link to CRAN (R programming language). However, there is no article entitled CRAN (R programming language). Instead, that redirects to R (programming language)#Packages, when I think it should redirect to R package#Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).

What needs to happen to fix this?

There must be a redirect page, but I cannot see how to access it to change it. DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:36, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

The redirect page is here: CRAN (R programming language)CRAN (R programming language). Usually when you follow a redirect you can simply scroll back up to the top of the page, where you'll find a small link under the article title which will take you back to the redirect page. – Joe (talk) 14:47, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I just changed the redirect page you helped me find. I assume you agree with this change? DavidMCEddy (talk) 15:28, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Sure, sounds sensible. I've also retargeted Comprehensive R Archive NetworkComprehensive R Archive Network to match. – Joe (talk) 15:55, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

On 2020-12-07T10:42:37 User:164.100.212.185 modified the Mandelbrot set example in several ways:

• The colors were changed to alternatives that, to me at least, seemed sharper and crisper
• However, the gif file created by the code was NOT changed, so the code no longer produced the gif that is displayed immediately after the code and is available in Wikimedia Commons:

File:Mandelbrot Creation Animation.gif

The revised code also introduces some deficiencies. Most importantly, the description still says that the code calculates "the first 20 iterations". In fact, it calculates the first 11, but stores only iterations 2:11 discarding the first. It discards the first through a subtle infelicity in the code in assigning the first iteration to X[,,0], which is ignored.

If this example is to be modified, the changes should at minimum in include the following:

1. Upload the gif that produces the included animation to Wikimedia Commons. This should be done under a different name, because the current gif is used in 5 other places in Wikimedia Commons and 9 other Wikipedia articles. Changing it would likely mean that the gif would no longer match the description in those articles.
2. Change the description to match the gif that is produced.

DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:18, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

I noticed that the article on the Python (programming language) is focused primarily on the language specifics and standard (base) libraries while the page for R has very little of that by comparison, and has a lot of ad-like references to a specific companies and products. When I tried to remove language that made parts of the article look like an endorsement for RStudio someone tried to revert the changes as if they were spam.

"Development environments" or "interface" sections are easy areas where ad or marketing content can be added. I think we either need to give equal weight to all IDEs or order them in ways that do not give preference to one over the other. Simply listing IDEs and editors in an alphabetical list without comment is another option. (Raquart (talk) 00:37, 15 December 2020 (UTC))

I don't see anything that could be construed as an advertisement in the current article. Could you point to something specific? We shouldn't exactly give equal weight to all IDEs – we should give them due weight in accordance with their prominence in reliable sources about R. In that sense RStudio should definitely be more prominent than others. And integration into neutral prose is always better than a bare list. – Joe (talk) 07:18, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

It is highly atypical to name specific IDEs in articles on programming languages. Take a look at python. In that article not a single IDE or library is mentioned. The popular R-inspired Pandas library is not mentioned on the Python article title page, neither are any Python IDEs included in the "See also" section. Is there some reason why you believe that RStudio deserves to be mentioned in the opening paragraph, or why this article needs to mention IDEs at all? It's my view that this article could do with an overhaul, including more specific language detail about Base R and a more neutral presentation of code editors, if their inclusion is appropriate at all. (Raquart (talk) 06:00, 20 December 2020 (UTC))

We're not trying to duplicate the article on Python. We're trying to proportionally summarise what reliable sources say about R. Clearly, a good chunk of that coverage (especially recently) is about RStudio, other IDEs, and certain widely-used packages. I agree that there are many ways in which this article could be improved, but I don't think removing relevant, referenced material on parts of the R ecosystem is an improvement. Again, if you could point to specific parts that you think are unduly promotional, we have something to talk about. I struggle to see how a statement that RStudio and Jupityer notebooks exist, or plain links to related articles in the see also section , could possibly be promotional. – Joe (talk) 10:50, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

There are no sources that warrant putting RStudio and Jupityer notebook in the introduction to the exclusion of other unrelated software. If you use these tools that's fine, but the article shouldn't make it seem like that's the standard. IDEs have about as much to do with R as Eclipse has to do with Java. My edits are well sourced and I am trying to improve the page incrementally and following wikipedia standards doing so. I would ask that you please stop blindly reverting my edits like they were spam. (Raquart (talk) 17:13, 20 December 2020 (UTC))

There is nothing stopping you from expanding on other editors with sources. I'm reverting your edits because you keep removing sourced material without consensus. Please follow BRD and stop edit warring. You should also try and familiarise yourself with our content policies, because you keep making arguments about what to include here based on analogies, but that's that reasoning doesn't work on Wikipedia. We decide what to include (and by extension what to summarise in the lead) based on coverage in reliable sources. RStudio is widely cited as the most popular editor for R , and more to the point, unlike other, multilanguage IDEs like Eclipse, the company behind it is also a major contributor to the R ecosystem, including extremely widely used platforms like the tidyverse packages or RMarkdown notebooks. And it isn't even mentioned all that much in the article... – Joe (talk) 19:07, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm not removing "sourced material": I am removing content that appears elsewhere in the article and detracts from the introduction. You claim here and in edit comments that "[RStudio] is also a major contributor to the R ecosystem" but I don't see any evidence to support that claim, and they neither manage the base R code base nor do they release their own forked version of R. RStudio appears to be no more essential to R than google is to Python. My argument is that a single company doesn't deserve to be highlighted in the introduction over others. I'm not stripping all references to RStudio from the page here so I don't understand your opposition to my edits. Again, in every other wikipedia programming language I checked IDEs are not named in the introduction and specific libraries are not named in the "See also" section. Why exactly should R be any different? And on your point about the collection of R libraries known as the "Tidyverse": if it is so important shouldn't it have its own section here, complete with criticisms? Maybe you should contribute and add one. Still, from the reference here I don't understand why Tidyverse (or any other R library for that matter) warrants inclusion in the See Also section. (Raquart (talk) 19:32, 20 December 2020 (UTC))

Can you please tell me what your problem with this following edit to interfaces was? You reverted it:

Designated IDEs for R include (in alphabetical order) Rattle GUI, R Commander, RKWard, and RStudio. R is also supported in multi-purpose IDEs such as Eclipse via the StatET plugin, and Visual Studio via the R Tools for Visual Studio.

Editors that support R include Emacs, Vim (Nvim-R plugin), Kate, LyX, Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, WinEdt, and Tinn-R. Jupyter Notebook can also be configured to edit and run R code.

R functionality is accessible from several scripting languages such as Python, Perl,Ruby, F#, and Julia. Interfaces to other, high-level programming languages, like Java and .NET C# are available as well.

Thanks, (Raquart (talk) 19:08, 20 December 2020 (UTC))

I reverted the rest of the edit, as you know, because it removed material from the lead, which you have tried to do before and know you don't have consensus for. – Joe (talk) 13:47, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

The article right now spends very little time on the actual language specifics of R. I am planning on moving the current "Examples" section into a to-be-expanded "Syntax and semantics" section, and keeping the Mandelbrot set where it is in the Example section. R is notable for the way it handles handles array and it's environment-based programming paradigm, and including these in the article will helpfully emphasize how it differs from languages like Java, C++, and Python. The new section will can also give time to major language features, such as data.frame, which is inexplicably not included despite being so popular other non-R libraries (such as Python's Pandas) have adopted it.

We also need a discussion of how R handles environments, which is a key feature of R, including what the <<- operator is. We need to specifically mention how the <- operator is used, and how [[ and [ work. A discussion of the methods library (part of the standard library) and S3 vs S4 also should be included as that is how R implements Object-oriented programming. They are all key features of R.

To kick things off: here is an expanded list of possible examples that that I believe could be incorporated into the main article to better emphasize what makes R unique:

> x <- 1:6 # Creates a numeric vector in the current environment
> y <- x^2 # Create vector by formula.
> print(y) # Print the vector’s contents.
[1]  1  4  9 16 25 36

> z <- x + y # Create a new vector that is the sum of x and y
> z # Write the contents of z to the current environment.
[1]  2  6 12 20 30 42

> z_matrix <- matrix(z,nrow=3) # Create a new matrix that transforms z into a 3x2 matrix
> z_matrix 
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]    2   20
[2,]    6   30
[3,]   12   42

> 2*t(z_matrix)-2 # Transpose the matrix, multiple every element by 2, subtract 2 from each element in the matrix, and write the results to the terminal.
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,]    2   10   22
[2,]   38   58   82

> new_df <- data.frame(t(z_matrix),row.names=c('A','B')) # Create a new data.frame that contains the data from a transposed z_matrix, with row names 'A' and 'B'
> names(new_df) <- c('X','Y','Z') # set the column names of the data.frame as X, Y, and Z.
> print(new_df)  #print the results.
   X  Y  Z
A  2  6 12
B 20 30 42

> new_df$Z #output the Z column using the $ operator
[1] 12 42

> all(new_df$Z==new_df['Z'], new_df['Z']==new_df[3]) # shows that the Z column can be access using $Z, ['Z'], and [3] syntax and that they are equivalent. 
[1] TRUE

> attributes(new_df) #print attributes information about the new_df object
$names
[1] "X" "Y" "Z"

$row.names
[1] "A" "B"

$class
[1] "data.frame"

(Raquart (talk) 18:14, 20 December 2020 (UTC))

It would be good to cover all these points, but doing so in prose is far better than code examples. Code is harder to verify, harder for a general audience to understand, and extended examples very quickly fall afoul of WP:NOTHOWTO. – Joe (talk) 13:52, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

I am seeing the Infobox claim that R was influenced by the following languages: Common Lisp, S, Scheme, XLispStat. While R may have started out trying to use "the methods of Lisp implementors" and tried to use a "Schema-like interpreter" the source clearly shows that the R language is exclusively based on S Programming Language.

To drive the point home, this is from the R manual, 'An Introduction to R': "R can be regarded as an implementation of the S language which was developed at Bell Laboratories by Rick Becker, John Chambers and Allan Wilks, and also forms the basis of the S-PLUS systems."

Given this, I think that the following changes should be uncontroversial 1) removing links to Lisp and Scheme from the infobox, 2) adding a statement in the introduction that R is an implementation of S. -Raquart (talk) 18:09, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

R was originally a free implementation of S and is still sometimes described as "GNU S" by the Core Team. So yes its major influence is definitely S and that could be added to the lead. But it's certainly not exclusively based on S; there were differences in the earliest versions, especially in its use of lexical scoping, which was inspired by Scheme/Lisp, and of course they have diverged greatly since S stopped being actively developed in the late 1990s. The influence of Scheme is supported by the cited source (Despite the similarity between R and S, there remain number of key differences. The two fundamental differences result from R’s Scheme heritage.) and this source can be added to support the influences from Lisp more generally R supports all the object structure of S but with an implementation at the primitive level reflecting influence from Lisp. – Joe (talk) 18:42, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

I think it's relevant to this section (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)#Communities). The site brings together over 1,000 bloggers (link) for over 10 years now (link), but since I have conflict of interest I don't want to be the one making this decision. So I'm flagging it here, in case others agree, and would be willing to add it. Tal Galili (talk) 09:46, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

@Joe Roe: Thanks for your edit, wherein you supplied the comprehensive starting membership of R Core. However, I think there are too many red links and I propose they are either undone, or someone volunteers to write articles on each of those individuals. What do you think? — BroVic (talk) 09:40, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

The second option is the idea. – Joe (talk) 10:45, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

As someone using R every day, thank you for both for your attention to this article! I'm wondering if it would be helpful to note in this article the professions of all members of the R Core Team. I did some google search on these people. It seems that most of these people are statisticians except perhaps Kalibera and Falcon, who seem more like computer engineers. I have no idea who schwarte is though. Would you happen to know more about him? Tommyren (talk) 23:12, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

As Joe Roe has pointed out, articles should be written on these notables where some of the facts you just mentioned could be highlighted, and not necessarily in this one. Cheers. — BroVic (talk) 09:31, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

I agree that it would be nice to have separate articles written on these notable members of the R Core Team.

I also agree that "it would be helpful to note in this article the professions of all members of the R Core Team." DavidMCEddy (talk) 09:42, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

I will try to devote some time to this. If I get around to doing it, I will tag you all. — BroVic (talk) 10:08, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

WP:NPOV suggests that we should not make this statement. We could, instead, just leave it at what follows the phrase: "as of August 2021, R ranked 14th out of the languages listed in the TIOBE index, a measure of programming language popularity." The stats should be updated as it went to 9 and is 15 today. Its "Highest Position (since 2007): #8 in Aug 2020" per https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/r/. We could also include that its "Lowest Position (since 2007): #73 in Dec 2008", which is definitely not popular let alone highly popular. 208.81.213.2 (talk) 00:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree that the sentences you are referring to seem a bit problematic. Personally, I think the best solution is to just delete the entire sentence in the lead, and find a place in the main text to address how R compares to other languages in terms of usership. Tommyren (talk) 17:17, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Do we have any sources that can support that Common Lisp Influenced R? The closest thing I can find is https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2020/RJ-2020-028/RJ-2020-028.pdf, but the article does not mention common lisp in particular, and it could be that all of the lisp influence was obtained via Scheme.Tommyren (talk) 02:28, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

See Talk:R_(programming_language)/Archive_2#R is based on the S programming language. – Joe (talk) 07:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Joe! The source says R is influenced by Lisp, with no mention of Common Lisp, which is a dialect of Lisp. In fact, scheme is also a dialect of lisp, so it is possible that all of the lisp influence on R is exerted by Scheme, with no involvement from common lisp. Tommyren (talk) 08:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't know why Common Lisp is there. But both sources separately discuss influences from Lisp (or "Lisp-style languages") generically and Scheme specifically. Chambers for example only attributes lexical scoping to Scheme's influence, but makes several references to the importance of "Lisp-style lists" in R's design without specifying a dialect. So I think it's safe to say that both Lisp in general and Scheme specifically were influences. I'd suggest altering the infobox to something like Lisp (Scheme); the place to discuss how these influences came to be in detail—and cite references—is the body of the article. – Joe (talk) 09:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The data frame is an imporant part of using R, but is not well described here at all. Even more, the data frame link redirects to something completely different, and where it doesn't really apply. If this article had a good description of one, it would be a good place to redirect it to. Gah4 (talk) 00:27, 19 January 2022 (UTC)