Abstract

R is a open-sourced software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data analysts for developing statistical workflows for data analysis. R is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently developed by the R Development Core Team.

Bioconductor is a project to develop innovative software tools for use in computational biology. It is based on the R language. Bioconductor packages provide flexible interactive tools for carrying out a number of different computational tasks. Literate programming and analytical pipeline crafting.

R and Bioconductor may not be as fast as dedicated bioinformatics software for computationally intensive processes such as mapping short sequence reads onto the genome, but the flexibility of having raw access to all of the data, methods and structure is empowering.