John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project.
He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S.
He donated his prize money (US$10,000) to the American Statistical Association to endow an award for novel statistical software.Chambers is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.He was a Consulting Professor of Statistics at Stanford University.