R is the most used programming language for statistics and it is the gold standard for data analysis in the biomedical research. It can be used both for computing analysis on data and for graphical representation.
R has a long history, dating back to 1993. The language had gained great popularity between statisticians. Its origin is in academia and it is taught in university courses. However the increase of interest in data mining and analysis had made the language very popular even in business.
Technically it is a traditional programming language paired with great support for everything related for data analysis: from reading data to text files to create beautiful graphs.
The R environment is quite stable and very few innovations have been introduced in the recent years. While this might seem a negative point for traditional programmers, who like innovation, it is quite encouraging for data analyst and institutions that can rest sure that investing in educating people to use R will bring returns for a long time. The stability is also very appreciated in a field where results have to be reliable and timely.
The most valuable point of R is the incredible amount of packages available. These packages provide all sort of features to manipulate data and generate statistics and plots. Popular repositories for distributing packages are:
The common R users are researchers or statisticians (i.e., domain experts) and not professional developers, and this is where MetaR can help.