[R] popular R packages

[Thomas Adams]

I don't think "At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread 
suggested that it would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of 
downloads by package." is reasonable because I download R packages for 2 
home computers (laptop & desktop) and 2 at work (1 Linux & 1 Mac). There 
must be many such cases…

Tom

David Winsemius wrote:
> When the question arises "How many R-users there are?", the consensus 
> seems to be that there is no valid method to address the question. The 
> thread "R-business case" from 2004 can be found here:
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/047606.html
>
> I did not see any material revision to that conclusion during the 
> recent discussion of the New York Times article on the r-challenge to 
> SAS.
>
> Gmane tracks the number of r-help activity (I realize not what you 
> asked for):
> http://www.gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general
>
> The distribution of r-packages is, well ... distributed:
> http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
>
> At least one of the participants in the 2004 thread suggested that it 
> would be a "good thing" to track the numbers of downloads by package. 
> I have not heard of any such system being installed in the mirror 
> software and I see nothing that suggests data gathering in the CRAN 
> Mirror How-to:
> http://cran.r-project.org/mirror-howto.html
>
> On the other hand I am not part of R-core, so you must await more 
> authoritative opinion since a 5 year-old thread and amateur 
> speculation is not much of a leg to stand on.
>
> There are lexicographic packages for R. One approach to a de novo 
> analysis would be to do some sort of natural language analysis of the 
> r-help archives counting up either package names with non-English 
> names or close proximity of the words "library" or "package" to 
> package names that overlap the 30,000 common English words. That would 
> have the danger of inflating counts of the packages with the least 
> adequate documentation or a paucity of good worked examples, but there 
> are many readers of this list who suspect that new users don't look at 
> the documentation, so who knows?
>


-- 
Thomas E Adams
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