An engineering test model of the Vector-R rocket at Pad 0B of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia. Credit: Vector Updated 12:45 a.m. Eastern Aug. 10 with company statement.

Vectors, lists, arrays, matrices and data frames -- a look at five of the most fundamental data structures built into R. Among my colleagues, R is one of the fastest-growing programming languages.

Almost every R user knows about popular packages like dplyr and ggplot2. But with 10,000+ packages on CRAN and yet more on GitHub, it’s not always easy to unearth libraries with great R functions. One ...