[Rd] Milestone: 8000 packages on CRAN

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Another 1000 packages were added to CRAN, which took less than 7
months. Today (February 29, 2017), the Comprehensive R Archive Network
(CRAN) [1] reports:

“Currently, the CRAN package repository features 8002 available packages.”

The rate with which new packages are added to CRAN is increasing.  In
2014-2015 we had 1000 packages added to CRAN in 355 days (2.8 per
day), the following 1000 packages took 287 days (3.5 per day) and now
the most recent 1000 packages clocked in at an impressive 201 days
(5.0 per day).  Since the start of CRAN 18.9 years ago on April 23,
1997 [2], there has been on average one new package appearing on CRAN
every 20.6 hours - it is actually more frequent than that because
dropped/archived packages are not accounted for. The 8000 packages on
CRAN are maintained by ~4279 people [3].

Thanks to the CRAN team and to all package developers. You can give
back by carefully reporting bugs to the maintainers, properly citing
any packages you use in your publications, cf. citation("pkg name")
and help out helping others using the R.

Milestones:

2016-02-29: 8000 packages [this post]
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

Thanks

Henrik
(a long-term fan)