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

[Kjetil Halvorsen]

One should also take into account the other R list. For example, as of
today the number of subscribers to
R-help-es (R-help for spanish speakers) is 290, increasing.

Kjetil Halvorsen

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob)
<muenchen at utk.edu> wrote:
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org]
>>On Behalf Of Ted Harding
>>Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 3:42 PM
>>To: r-help at r-project.org
>>Subject: Re: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata...
>>
>>
>>I've given thought in the past to the question of estimating the R
>>user base, and came to the conclusion that it is impossible to get
>>an estimate of the number of users that one could trust (or even
>>put anything like a margin of error to).
>>
>>I think one could get a number which represented a moderately
>>informative lower bound -- just count the number of different email
>>addresses that have ever posted to the R-help list. This will of
>>course include people who post (or have posted) from more than one
>>email address, and people who tried R for a while and then dropped
>>it, but my feeling is that these are likely to be outweighed by the
>>number of people who have used R but have never posted (for example
>>students who are getting their R help from their instructors, people
>>using R in a corporate context who are discouraged from posting to
>>public lists, etc.).
>
> Ted, that's a very interesting suggestion. Do you know of a practical
> way of getting that count?
>
>>
>>The number of subscribers to R-help (currently about 10200) is
>>a definite lower bound for the number of R users, but many users
>>post to R-help without being subscribed.
>
> 10,200 is quite an amazing number! Here are the number of subscribers
> to:
>
> SAS-L    3,251
> SPSSX-L  2,103
> Statlist 1,847
> S-PLUS - havn't figured out how to get this yet
>
> How did you get the R-help figure?
>
>>
>>I would expect that the total number of different email addresses
>>that have posted to R-help would be considerably larger than 10200.
>>
>>I don't think a "Mark-Recapture" approach is feasible.
>>
>>Further, I don't know how one might take account of the fact that
>>some installations of R (e.g. on a corporate or institutional
>>or departmental server) may each be used by several users.
>
> The server question in particular intrigues me. Research organizations
> are stuffed with high performance clusters. The cost of all the
> commercial packages is just incredible. Even at the heavily discounted
> rate academia gets, they're still unaffordable. However, if queried we'd
> find the commercial packages on them, but limited to 4 out of 2,500
> nodes! You might see the reverse in industry, with one mainframe copy of
> SAS serving hundreds of users.
>
> Cheers,
> Bob
>
>>
>>Ted.
>>
>>--------------------------------------------------------------------
>>E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
>>Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861
>>Date: 20-Jun-10                                       Time: 20:41:43
>>------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
>>
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>>PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-
>>guide.html
>>and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>