On Mon, 30 Jul 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 30-Jul-07 08:28:15, John Logsdon wrote: >> I am trying to get a measure of how R compares in usage as a >> statistical platform compared to other software. I would guess >> it is the most widely used among statisticians at least by >> virtue of it being open source.
I don't think that is the main reason. Most of the R users I know migrated from commercial statistical software for reasons other than cost. (Cross-platform availability has been one major reason.) >> But is there any study to which I can refer? By asking this >> list I am not exactly adopting a rigorous approach! > > I don't know about that -- my own expectation would be that > serious users of R are likely to be subscribers to the list. > > So maybe a good answer to your question would be the number > of subscribers (which I'm sure Martin Maechler can find out). > Of course, some people will have subscribed under more than > one email address, so that would somewhat over-estimate the > number of people who subscribe. But it can be traded off > (to a somewhat unknown extent) against R users who do not > subscribe. I think it would be a seriously biased estimate. Few of our hundreds of student users will be subscribed to R-help (since their first port of call for help is local). Also, we get quite a lot of postings via the gmane and nabble gateways. > More to the point, though, is what you mean by "usage". > If you simply mean "people who use", that's a matter of > counting (one way or another). But there's "use" and "use". Indeed. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
