Today we got to hear from Dr. Çetinkaya-Rundel, a statistician who has made significant contributions to RStudio, an open-source statistics software that aids data scientists. RStudio is based on the R language, a programming language that was designed with statistics in mind and has a large variety of tools to analyze data and visualize results easily. RStudio is not only a development environment for R, but also has several other non-programming utilities to analyze data. RStudio, as previously mentioned, is also open-source. Open-source software, or OSS, is a software model where any verified contributor can contribute to the development of the software, and the software is not always maintained by a specific company (although it can be). OSS is also free to use and anyone can get a copy simply by downloading one. It’s a bit like crowdsourced development, and it has been extremely effective at enabling a large variety of people to have access to tools they otherwise would not. RStudio has aided the advancement of data science greatly, and the community and its features are only growing.
