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

[Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Liviu Andronic [mailto:landronimirc at gmail.com]
>Sent: Friday, June 25, 2010 7:15 AM
>To: Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)
>Cc: r-help at r-project.org
>Subject: Re: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...
>
>On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)
><muenchen at utk.edu> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>This is not much of a metric, probably not even a ballpark, but I have
>a habit of measuring the popularity of a software by the number of
>unread messages in my mail account, sent to one of its main mailing
>lists. For example, I subscribed to Gentoo, Xfce and LyX MLs much
>earlier than to that of R, but R quickly and surpassed all in number
>of unread messages. At the moment I have the following: R ( 37k), LyX
>(10k), Debian (7k), Xfce (<3k), Geany (.5k). I dare say that R might
>be more popular than Debian, but again, any such estimation seems
>farfetched.
>
>Regards
>Liviu

Hi Liviu,

E-mail was the thing that got me back to this paper. I had been working on variations of measures for several years & was frustrated mostly by how many problems I ran into regarding search logic ("SAS" stands for about 15 scientific topics and of course "R" is far worse). I have all my listserv email routed to a set of folders which I always empty at the same time. I noticed that recently R-Help had really taken off and that Statalist had surpassed SAS-L. So I got the latest monthly data from the listservs and switched the program from doing yearly counts to means of the monthly figures so I could add 2010 to it. Figure 1 at  http://r4stats.com/popularity is indeed the number of emails send by each of the listservs. All these measures have their own limitations, but I find that graph the most interesting since it includes the trends across time.

Cheers,
Bob