R is an open-source implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics from Scheme, which allow objects to be defined in predetermined blocks rather than the entirety of the code. S was created by Rick Becker, John Chambers, Doug Dunn, Jean McRae, and Judy Schilling at Bell Labs around 1976. Designed for statistical analysis, the language is an interpreted language whose code could be directly run without a compiler.[11] Many programs written for S run unaltered in R. As a dialect of the Lisp language, Scheme was created by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. at MIT around 1975. In 1991, statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, embarked on an S implementation.[13] It was named partly after the first names of the first two R authors and partly as a play on the name of S. They began publicizing it on the data archive StatLib and the s-news mailing list in August 1993. In 1995, statistician Martin Mächler convinced Ihaka and Gentleman to make R free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. The first official release came in June 1995. The first official “stable beta” version (v1.0) was released on 29 February 2000. The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) was officially announced on 23 April 1997. CRAN stores R’s executable files, source code, documentations, as well as packages contributed by users. CRAN originally had 3 mirrors and 12 contributed packages. As of January 2022, it has 101 mirrors and 18,728 contributed packages. In addition to hosting packages CRAN hosts binaries for major distributions of Linux, MacOS and Windows.