Question: Initial Post
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
Why are statistical programming languages important to data scientists? What are some advantages and disadvantages the R programming language has over the other main statistical programming languages (i.e. Python, SAS, SQL)? 350 words or more include at least three citations (APA) from academic resources (i.e. the textbook, University of the Cumberlands Library resources, etc.).