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

[Hadley Wickham]

> I agree with all your points. What I have so far is nowhere near the big
> picture, but it's a start. When you install some software it asks if you
> mind it reporting usage stats back to its home site. I know that sort of
> thing has been discussed before on R-help. I'd love to see that added so
> we would have a better estimate of R's user base.

I wonder if there are any capture-recapture type methodologies for
estimating open-source software usage?  Another idea would be to
combine with some other known numbers, e.g. book sales, conference
attendance etc. You'd need personal information to link the data sets
together.

Hadley

PS.  It would be also interesting to see the contributions of the
R-SIG mailing lists and other specialised R related mailing lists.  My
feeling is that there is not a lot of overlap between the members of
the ggplot2 mailing list and R-help.

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/