# [R] Size of R user base

Patrick Burns pburns at pburns.seanet.com
Wed Apr 21 00:20:44 CEST 2004

I disagree with Martin.  I think his confidence interval is sufficient for
management decisions.  There are three basic questions that should

1)  Does it do what we want?

2) Will it disappear?

3) Is the quality sufficient?

Question 1 can only be answered within the organization.

Question 2 is partly answered by Martin's and other's estimates of
the user base.  The volume of messages on R-help is another clue --
this is probably more correlated with the number of new users than
the total number of users.

I think there is sufficient evidence that R will survive at least as long
as the expected duration of a manager's tenure, and that there will
be a reasonable supply of potential employees with knowledge of
it.

As for Question 3, I -- who am a magnet for bugs-- have been using
R intensely for 2 years now, and have only found a couple of esoteric
bugs (one of which is clearly not down to R) plus two or three minor
bugs which have been fixed.  This is a level of excellence that I
never would have imagined.

In contrast, for 5 weeks I've been using a now obsolete version of
another language not unlike R on an operating system that ought to be
obsolete. In that time I've found 2 serious bugs (i.e., system
terminating --
only one of which is esoteric), and a couple other moderately annoying
bugs.

Patrick Burns

Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

Martin Maechler wrote:

>
>About a confidence interval': If we log transform it becomes
>feasible to give an interval I'm quite confident'' about:
>
>  log10(N) \in [3.5, 5.3]
>
>but then that's probably not informative enough for management
>decisions.
>
>Martin
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
`