eRum 2018 keynote presentation files
Not infrequently, we wonder why choices such as stringsAsFactors=TRUE or drop=TRUE were made. Understanding the original uses of S and R (in the 1900s), and seeing how these uses affected the development of R lets us appreciate the robustness of R's ecosystem. This keynote uses readings of the R sources and other information to explore R's history. The topics to be touched on include the "colour" books (brown, blue, white, green), interlinkages to SICP (Scheme) and LispStat, the lives of R-core and CRAN, Ancients and Moderns (see Exploring the CRAN social network).