John Chambers is one of the creators of the S programming language,a pre-cursor to R. In this article, he describes how both R and S were developed with goal of advancing data science.
John Chambers. S, R, and data science. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2020-06-01. 4(HOPL), 1�17. DOI: 10.1145/3386334 Available in pdf format.