[R] Size of R user base

[Philippe Grosjean]

Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

>[...]
>The first rule of measurement is "Don't bother with a measurement if you
>don't know what you're going to do with the answer".  If you knew the
>number of "R users", however defined, how would that actually help you?

Obviously, there are lots of statisticians and people used to work with
measurements... and who know how it can be difficult to use, and interpret
them (is it surprising in R-Help mailing list?). However, I think that the
*change in time* of this number (as soon as it is somehow representative to
the reality, that is, an unbiased measurement of effective use of the
software) is the interesting phenomenon. I would be very interested to have
this figure: change in time of R users.

Now, it appears that:
1) For ethical reasons, it is not conceivable to place a "spyware", as some
call it, in R and
2) for obvious reasons, we would never have unbiased estimation of the
evaluation of the number of users if the process ask each user if he is
willing to send this information, or not.

So, what do we have? Not much, except the number of books about R sold (this
fluctuation in time is not representative, because there are also more books
about R now than in the past,... and for other reasons).

We have also the activity in the R-help mailing list, which could be
representative of the most active users, certainly. Does anyone have of
figure of the number of messages in R-Help with time since its creation? (it
is probably available somewhere, but I don't know where).

Still, this is not representative at all of occasional users that probably
represent the largest fraction. I am particularly interested by them.
Especially because one of my works focus on GUI, that is, something supposed
to ease access and help occasional users to get into the software!
Best,

Philippe Grosjean

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