[R] Size of R user base

[Jonathan Baron]

I looked at the number of unique IP addresses who come to my R
search site (in sig below).  The result was surpising, and I fear
I did it wrong.

I have been doing it each week, and typical numbers are around
700.  (Sometimes as high as 900 when I do something like this,
which reminds people of its existence.)  For the last 4.5 weeks,
the total of the weekly totals comes to 3148.  But the number of
unique addresses in the same period, combining all weeks, is
2586.  That means that a (to me) surprisingly high proportion of
users is new each week.  Extend this over years, and it adds up.

The command I used was (folded here, but originally on one line):

grep -e htsearch -e " /R/" access_log* | cut -d" " -f1 | cut -d:
-f2 | sort | uniq | wc -l

Of course, IP addresses are crude, because some people use more
than one, and some addresses are used by more than one person,
but I suspect that they are within one power of 10 of the right
answer.  (In my field, that is called "precise.")

FWIW, I have several students who use R.  They have downloaded
it, but they do not use my R page or subscribe to the help list.
They ask me for help instead.

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
R page:               http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/