S (programming language)

S is a statistical programming language and environment developed by John Chambers and colleagues at Bell Laboratories beginning in 1976, designed to make data analysis and statistical computing more interactive and programmable than the batch-oriented statistical packages of its era. S combined a general-purpose, largely functional programming language with a rich library of statistical and graphical functions, and its design directly inspired the later, now far more widely used R programming language, an open-source reimplementation of the S language and environment, as well as the commercial S-PLUS implementation of S itself.