[Rd] R Usage Statistics

[Kevin R. Coombes]

Hi,

I got the following comment from the reviewer of a paper (describing an 
algorithm implemented in R) that I submitted to BMC Bioinformatics:

"Finally, which useful for exploratory work and some prototyping, 
neither R nor S-Plus are appropriate environments for deploying user 
applications that would receive much use."

I can certainly respond by pointing out that CRAN contains more than 
2000 packages and Bioconductor contains more than 350. However, does 
anyone have statistics on how often R (and possibly some R packages) are 
downloaded, or on how many people actually use R?

Thanks,
    Kevin