[R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, S-PLUS updated

[Mike Marchywka]

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> Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:40:39 +0000
> From: allane at cybaea.com
> To: muenchen.bob at gmail.com
> CC: friendly at yorku.ca; hadley at rice.edu; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] Popularity of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, Statistica, S-PLUS updated
>
> Not R, but just to get the data (format is month year,week,count) to
> compare with your students' output:
>
[...]
> Hope this helps a little.
>
> Allan
> (Who thinks it is very sad that he can remember that $c=()=$a=~$b
> construct...)
>
>
> On 22/03/11 23:26, Bob Muenchen wrote:
> > On 3/22/2011 5:15 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
> >>> I don't doubt that R may be the "most popular" in terms of
> >>> discussion group
> >>> traffic, but you should be aware that the traffic for SAS comprises two
> >>> separate lists that used to be mirrored, but are no longer linked


I think this discussion highlights the need for more structured document
formats on the internet so you can separete out mirrored or copied
text( see for example all the ad supported sites that simply copy wikipedia content). 
I've sometimes done things like this with pubmed
citations but they provide something called "eutils" api


http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

so you don't need to scrape html or other human readable content.
It is then easy to plot paper or author count as function of year
for some key word criteria and it can be interesting to see how
fads come and go. 
You see a lot of questions here on " how do I use R to scrape html"
and it is a big problem in doing many kinds of analysis. Yahoo
is doing a nice service by making downloads of histoical data available
but this is not common, even places like census often only offer
Excel format downloads ( while this is fine for R users, csv files would be just
as good and reach a wider audience ) 
and some places do require you to make complicated POST or other request types. 




> >>> Usenet -- news://comp.soft-sys.sas (what you counted)
> >>> listserve -- "SAS-L" http://www.listserv.uga.edu/archives/sas-l.html
> >> R programming challenge: create a script that parses those html pages
> >> to compute the total number of messages per week! (Maybe I'll use
> >> this in class)
> >>
> >> Hadley
> >>
> >
> > That would be nice! I'd love to have all the sources, which includes
> > various company forums. Sounds like students could be kept busy for
[[elided Hotmail spam]]
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Bob
> >
>
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