[R] popular R packages

David Winsemius dwinsemius at comcast.net
Sun Mar 8 00:04:24 CET 2009


Quite so. It certainly is the case that Dirk Eddelbuettel suggested  
would be very desirable and I think Dirk's track record speaks for  
itself. I never said (and I am sure Dirk never intended) that one  
could take the raw numbers as a basis for blandly asserting that  
<nnnn> copies of <ttt> package are currently installed.

When I update packages, the automated process takes hold and I go for  
a cup of coffee. I only have at the moment two computers with R  
installed and have not updated any binary packages on Windoze in over  
a year.  Nonetheless, I do think the relative numbers of package  
downloads might be interpretable, or at the very least, the basis for  
discussions over beer.

-- 
David Winsemius


On Mar 7, 2009, at 5:45 PM, Thomas Adams wrote:

> I don't think "At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread  
> suggested that it would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of  
> downloads by package." is reasonable because I download R packages  
> for 2 home computers (laptop & desktop) and 2 at work (1 Linux & 1  
> Mac). There must be many such cases…
>
> Tom
>
> David Winsemius wrote:
>> When the question arises "How many R-users there are?", the  
>> consensus seems to be that there is no valid method to address the  
>> question. The thread "R-business case" from 2004 can be found here:
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/047606.html
>>
>> I did not see any material revision to that conclusion during the  
>> recent discussion of the New York Times article on the r-challenge  
>> to SAS.
>>
>> Gmane tracks the number of r-help activity (I realize not what you  
>> asked for):
>> http://www.gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general
>>
>> The distribution of r-packages is, well ... distributed:
>> http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
>>
>> At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread suggested that  
>> it would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of downloads by  
>> package. I have not heard of any such system being installed in the  
>> mirror software and I see nothing that suggests data gathering in  
>> the CRAN Mirror How-to:
>> http://cran.r-project.org/mirror-howto.html
>>
>> On the other hand I am not part of R-core, so you must await more  
>> authoritative opinion since a 5 year-old thread and amateur  
>> speculation is not much of a leg to stand on.
>>
>> There are lexicographic packages for R. One approach to a de novo  
>> analysis would be to do some sort of natural language analysis of  
>> the r-help archives counting up either package names with non- 
>> English names or close proximity of the words "library" or  
>> "package" to package names that overlap the 30,000 common English  
>> words. That would have the danger of inflating counts of the  
>> packages with the least adequate documentation or a paucity of good  
>> worked examples, but there are many readers of this list who  
>> suspect that new users don't look at the documentation, so who knows?
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Thomas E Adams
> National Weather Service
> Ohio River Forecast Center
> 1901 South State Route 134
> Wilmington, OH 45177
>
> EMAIL:	thomas.adams at noaa.gov
>
> VOICE:	937-383-0528
> FAX:	937-383-0033
>

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT




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