[R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...

[David Winsemius]

On Jun 20, 2010, at 10:24 AM, Stefan Grosse wrote:

> Am 20.06.2010 15:31, schrieb Muenchen, Robert A (Bob):
>
>> I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the  
>> popularity
>> of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S- 
>> PLUS,
>> R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've
>> come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure  
>> people
>> will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me  
>> know
>> what you think.
>
> Your analysis is quite web-based. But to define what popular means  
> is -
> I believe - hard. R is open source and very broad in its different
> applications so of course it generates much more e-mail and web  
> traffic
> because there are many different uses and users.
>
> SPSS and Stata for example are closed and very specialized.

I suspect proponents of their use would actively dispute the "very  
specialized" description.

> You get
> support also directly from the company and do not necessarily need a
> mailing list. Does this mean that they are less popular? I'd say no.

I was under the impression that both SAS and Stata actively support  
their two mailing lists, but the SAS FAQ disputes this impression  
regarding SAS.

>
> So the question I would raise here is whether it is a fair comparison?
> I know that is a sufficient statistics-subset like panel econometrics
> Stata is by far leading and for time series econometrics Eviews, Gauss
> in research. I would say that in the industry that I know plus in
> econometrics research those programs are much more widespread or
> "popular". To measure their popularity I would say a
> industry-and-education-wide-questionnaire should be used.
>
> Plus it is not sufficient so I would also name Matlab, Gauss, Ox,  
> Eviews
> from the areas of my "interest" (econometrics) as "popular"  
> proprietary
> software.
>
> I do not deny that R is becoming more popular, but I doubt whether
> mailing lists and search requests are enough to prove this hypothesis.

Certainly there are additional factors that might influence the  
absolute numbers of posting to a particular mailing list. The SAS  
mailing list/newsgroup, SAS-L/comp.soft-sys.sas, has a well- 
established Internet presence. Each one probably has a particular  
culture. (I was stunned to see the low number of daily posts to  
comp.soft-sys.sas when I just looked at the last week on  
GoogelGroups.) I didn't think either the SAS or the Stata lists had  
any sort of published or informal effort to steer users in the  
direction of R-ing the FM, searching-before-posting, or admonishments  
to RT-FAQ.  However, now that I look, it does appear that the  
Statalist FAQ  makes an effort similar to that of the r-help Posting  
Guide. There may be differences in the degree and clarity of the  
documentation as well. The Stata distribution includes a medium-sized  
library. All of that said, ..., the relative frequency of postings  
would seem to less subject to such influences.

The SAS curve with its peak in 2006-2008 and significantly lower  
numbers in more recent years contrasted with the steady increase in R  
and Stata would seem to reflect a material shift. Agreed, you cannot  
say that R passed SAS in number of active users, or that SAS has the  
same number of users as Stata. The flatness of SPSS also appears  
meaningful.  And within the R/S world the differences in the activity  
on Snews and rhelp are likewise pretty dramatic.

-- 

David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT