>-----Original Message----- >From: Liviu Andronic [mailto:landronim...@gmail.com] >Sent: Friday, June 25, 2010 7:15 AM >To: Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) >Cc: r-help@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) ><muenc...@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 ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.