[R] popular R packages

[Spencer Graves]

      I just did RSiteSearch("library(xxx)") with xxx = the names of 6 
packages familiar to me, with the following numbers of hits: 


hits package

 169 lme4
 165 nlme
   6 fda
   4 maps
   2 FinTS
   2 DierckxSpline
     

      Software could be written to (1) extract the names of current 
packages from CRAN then (2) perform queries similar to this on all such 
packages and summarize the results.  I don't have the time now to write 
code for this, but I've written similar code before for step (1);  it 
can be found in "scripts/TsayFiles.R" in the "FinTS" package on CRAN.  
For step (2), Sundar Dorai-Raj wrote code that is is included in the 
preliminary "RSiteSearch" package available from R-Forge via 
install.'packages("RSiteSearch",repos="http://r-forge.r-project.org")'. 

      Code to do this could probably be written (a) in a matter of 
seconds by many of those in the R Core team or (b) in a matter of hours 
by virtually any reader of this list using the examples I just cited.  
And it could provide numbers without a need to convince others to keep 
download statistics and make them available later. 

      Hope this helps. 
      Spencer Graves    

Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote:
> i have kept r installed on more than ten computers during the past few
> years, some of them running win + more than one linux distro, all of
> them having r, most often installed from a separate download.
>
> i know of many cases where students download r for the purpose of a
> course in statistics -- often an introductory course for students who
> otherwise have little to do with stats. some of them do it more than
> once during the semester, and many of them never use r again.
>
> taking into account that basic statistics courses are taught to most
> university students and that r is surely the most popular free
> statistical computing environment, download-based usage estimates may be
> a bit optimistic, unless 'usage' is taken to include 'learn-pass-forget'.
>
> vQ
>
>
>
> Tal Galili wrote:
>   
>> I agree with Thomas, over the years I have installed R on at least 5
>> computers.
>>
>> BTW: does any one knows how the website statistics of r-project are
>> being analyzed?
>> Since I can't see any "google analytics" or other tracking code in the main
>> website, I am guessing someone might be running some log-file analyzer - but
>> I'd rather hear that then assume.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 12:45 AM, Thomas Adams <Thomas.Adams at noaa.gov> 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
>>>
>>>       
>
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