Introducing R

Last updated on 2025-09-23 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 45 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • Why use R?

Objectives

  • Know advantages of analyzing data in R

Getting ready to use R for the first time

In this lesson we will take you through the very first things you need to get R working.

A Brief History of R

The programming language R has been around since 1995, and was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. R is based off the S programming language developed at Bell Labs and was developed to teach intro statistics. See this slide deck by Ross Ihaka for more info on the subject.

Advantages of using R

At more than 20 years old, R is fairly mature and growing in popularity. However, programming isn’t a popularity contest. Here are key advantages of analyzing data in R:

  • R is open source. This means R is free - an advantage if you are at an institution where you have to pay for your own MATLAB or SAS license. Open source, is important to your colleagues in parts of the world where expensive software in inaccessible. It also means that R is actively developed by a community (see r-project.org), and there are regular updates.
  • R is widely used. Ok, maybe programming is a popularity contest. Because, R is used in many areas (not just bioinformatics), you are more likely to find help online when you need it. Chances are, almost any error message you run into, someone else has already experienced.
  • R is powerful. R runs on multiple platforms (Windows/MacOS/Linux). It can work with much larger datasets than popular spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel, and because of its scripting capabilities is far more reproducible. Also, there are thousands of available software packages for science, including genomics and other areas of life science.
Discussion

Discussion: Your experience

What has motivated you to learn R? Have you had a research question for which spreadsheet programs such as Excel have proven difficult to use, or where the size of the data set created issues?

R on UVA HPC

On the UVA HPC system, R is available through our module system. For example, to load R, you can type:

BASH 

module load goolf R/4.4.1

and press Return. Now type the following to get into the R environment

BASH 

R

and press Return. You should see output on the screen which looks like this :

R version 4.4.1 (2024-06-14) -- "Race for Your Life"
Copyright (C) 2024 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

  Natural language support but running in an English locale

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

>

You now have a prompt > where you can enter R commands.

Key Points
  • R is a powerful, popular open-source scripting language