[Rd] Milestone: 9000 packages on CRAN

[Henrik Bengtsson]

An additional 1000 packages have been added to CRAN.  This time, it
took less than 6 months. Today (August 22, 2016), the Comprehensive R
Archive Network (CRAN) [1] reports:

“Currently, the CRAN package repository features 9004 available packages.”

The rate with which new packages are added to CRAN is increasing.
During 2007-2009 we went from 1000 to 2000 packages in 906 days (1.1
per day) and in 2014-2015 we went from 6000 to 7000 packages in 287
days (3.4 per day). The next 1000 packages took 201 days (5.0 per day)
and these most recent 1000 packages took only 175 days (5.7 per day).
With this speedup, we should hit 10000 packages on CRAN early 2017.

Since the start of CRAN on April 23, 1997 [2], there has been on
average one new package appearing on CRAN every 18.8 hours - actually
even more than that because dropped/archived packages are not
accounted for. The 9000 packages on CRAN are maintained by 5289 people
[3].

A big thank you to the R core, the CRAN team (!), to all package
developers, to our friendly community, to everyone out there helping
others, and to various online services that simplify package
development. We can all give back by carefully reporting bugs to the
maintainers, properly citing any packages you use in your publications
(see citation("pkg name")), and help new comers to use R.

Milestones:

2016-08-22: 9000 packages [this post]
2016-02-29: 8000 packages [12]
2015-08-12: 7000 packages [11]
2014-10-29: 6000 packages [10]
2013-11-08: 5000 packages [9]
2012-08-23: 4000 packages [8]
2011-05-12: 3000 packages [7]
2009-10-04: 2000 packages [6]
2007-04-12: 1000 packages [5]
2004-10-01: 500 packages [4]
2003-04-01: 250 packages [4]

These data are for CRAN only. There are many more packages elsewhere,
e.g. R-Forge, Bioconductor, Github etc.

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)#Milestones
[3] http://www.r-pkg.org/
[4] Private data
[5] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-April/045359.html
[6] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-October/055049.html
[7] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2011-May/061002.html
[8] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2012-August/064675.html
[9] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2013-November/067935.html
[10] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2014-October/069997.html
[11] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2015q3/000393.html
[12] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-February/072388.html

All the best,

Henrik