With the rise of big data, the R programming language has become one of the most popular languages. Indeed, the IEEE has it rated as number 5 in 2019. Probably the most popular environment for R is RStudio, an IDE for working with R. Of course, it’s also possible to use Emacs for this. Way back in 2011, I showed how to combine R and Org Babel to do some basic statistics.
That was just me fooling around, though. If you want to Combine R and Emacs seriously, there’s a bit more involved. Peter Prevos has a nice post that shows how he uses Emacs and ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics) to provide an excellent environment for writing R programs and including the results in documents. Included in his post is an example of a paper he wrote with the system1. You can see the Org source file at his GitHub repository along with the part of his Emacs configuration that supports the environment.
Prevos’ post is written from the point of view of someone in the social sciences who is not necessarily an engineer. The post even gives a brief account of how to get Emacs installed so it should be useful to anyone who’d like to use Emacs for R and doesn’t mind the learning curve involved.
Footnotes:
Actually, it was a rewrite of a paper he originally wrote using LaTeX and Sweave.