[R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...

[Stefan Grosse]

Am 20.06.2010 15:31, schrieb Muenchen, Robert A (Bob):

> I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity
> of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-PLUS,
> R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've
> come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people
> will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know
> what you think.

Your analysis is quite web-based. But to define what popular means is -
I believe - hard. R is open source and very broad in its different
applications so of course it generates much more e-mail and web traffic
because there are many different uses and users.

SPSS and Stata for example are closed and very specialized. You get
support also directly from the company and do not necessarily need a
mailing list. Does this mean that they are less popular? I'd say no.

So the question I would raise here is whether it is a fair comparison?
I know that is a sufficient statistics-subset like panel econometrics
Stata is by far leading and for time series econometrics Eviews, Gauss
in research. I would say that in the industry that I know plus in
econometrics research those programs are much more widespread or
"popular". To measure their popularity I would say a
industry-and-education-wide-questionnaire should be used.

Plus it is not sufficient so I would also name Matlab, Gauss, Ox, Eviews
from the areas of my "interest" (econometrics) as "popular" proprietary
software.

I do not deny that R is becoming more popular, but I doubt whether
mailing lists and search requests are enough to prove this hypothesis.

My 2cents
Stefan