R is a widely used programming language and software environment for statistical analysis and graphics. It was first created in 1993 at the University of Auckland as an implementation of the S language. R compiles and runs on Windows, Mac, and UNIX systems and includes packages for text mining, such as tm and SnowballC, which are used to preprocess text through steps like lowering case, removing stopwords and numbers, and stemming words. It also supports creating word clouds and sentiment analysis visualizations.