[R] popular R packages

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 08/03/2009 12:08 PM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>> I think the situation is worse than messy.  If a client comes in with data
>> that doesn't address the question they're interested in, I think they are
>> better served to be told that, than to be given an answer that is not
>> actually valid.  They should also be told how to design a study that
>> actually does address their question.
>>
>> You (and others) have mentioned Google Analytics as a possible way to
>> address the quality of data; that's helpful.  But analyzing bad data will
>> just give bad conclusions.
> 
>  As long as we say 'package Foo is the most downloaded package on
> CRAN', and not 'package Foo is the most used package for R', we can
> leave it to the user to decide if the latter conclusion follows from
> the former.

But we don't even have that data, since CRAN is distributed across lots 
of mirrors.

Duncan Murdoch

  In the absence of actual usage data I would think it a
> good approximation. Not that I would risk my life on it.
> 
>  Pop music charts are now based on download counts, but I wouldn't
> believe they represent the songs that are listened to the most times.
> Nor would I go so far as to believe they represent the quality of the
> songs...
> 
>  Should R have a 'Would you like to tell CRAN every time you do
> library(foo) so we can do usage counts (no personal data is
> transmitted blah blah) ?'? I don't think so....
> 
> Barry