John Chambers recounts the history of S and R

"R has had a revolutionary effect on the way statistics are communicated." So says John Chambers: one of the members of the R-core team overseeing R; and co-inventor of the S language. In this interview with Trevor Hastie (his co-author on Statistical Models in S), John Chambers recounts his involvement in the birth of the S language in 1976, and how it evolved over the years to become the inspiration for the R language.

 

(via Siamak Faridani.) One interesting tid-bit from the video: John Chambers owns the original CD-ROM (serial number #1) of R 1.0.0, released on February 29 2001 2000, and signed by all the members of R-core.

In 1998, John Chambers won the ACM Software Systems award for the S language, which the ACM heralded as having "forever altered how people analyze, visualize, and manipulate data". He generously used the prize money to create the John M Chambers Statistical Software Award, which recognizes innovative statistical software written by an undergraduate or graduate student. If you know a deserving recipient, the deadline for nominations for the 2014 award is February 18.

Comments

[Carl Witthoft]

In this same vein, http://www.r-project.org/user-2006/Slides/Chambers.pdf .

[SW]

As a relatively new user to R who didn't know too much about S at all, this was really great. Thanks!

[Roger Bivand]

Well, February 29 2001 is really 2000, isn't it?

[Martin Maechler]

I'm very grateful that this - notably John Chambers -
finally made it a bit prominently to the R blogosphere!
Thank you, David Smith!

@Roger Bivand: Definitely, it was Feb.29 2000, I was there. I've got CD-ROM #4 (I think) after John, Ross and Robert..

Apropos Feb.29 2000: A leap day according to the leap year rule you learn in (a decent) school,
but not according to Microsoft Windows (XP?) which was current at the time..

[David Smith]

Thanks Martin and Roger. I made a typo on the date of R 1.0.0 in the post, which I've corrected above.