it's wild that R, the ubiquitous statistical computing language, was co-created by a Māori prof (Ross Ihaka) — and yet the vast majority of scientists who use R don't know this is like inventing the toaster. possibly the largest impact of a single member of an indigenous community on modern science

To be fair, R began as an open source clone of S, a language developed at Bell Labs by Rick Becker and Allan Wilks in the 1970s. The utility of an important community resource written in S, statlib, was threatened by commercialization of S as a proprietary tool, Splus. R is not S is a play on S

I knew it was Kiwi but I didn't realie one of the creators is Māori. That's really cool. Do you know, if the original creators still create new packages?

If he'd been Porou not Kahungunu, there could have been another tie to Pickering - lots of PIckerings in Porou country. 🙂

I've been using R since ~2014 and am just learning this now ... thanks for sharing

I had no idea. That is awesome!

seriously i wish bluesky had polls bc I want to know how many scientists use R and are learning this fact now from this tweet. I'd wager over 90%

I had no idea. Thanks for sharing! I'll be sure to mention his contribution when I teach R in the future.

Wait, am I supposed to know who invented the toaster?

Did not realize Ihaka was Indigenous

Just had these produced. New R will go in Building 302 cabinet once they have been cleaned. There's also a very large poster of Ross and R which I commissioned to be printed on aluminium (don't have a photo to hand)