Hello, Am Montag, 19. April 2004 19:12 schrieb Kevin S. Van Horn: > 1. It appears that there are about 100,000 S-PLUS users.
Let me add one thought that I haven't seen in the discussion yet: To estimate the user base, one should perhaps not only look at S-Plus for comparison. R can be used for many other things than statistics. The users I know (physicists and geoscientists) use it for quite different purpose (e.g. numerically solving ODEs) for which they might have used Matlab instead, or they use it for plotting (as a replacement of IDL), whereas they may only need the most basic statistical features. I could imagine that uses outside "generic" statistics will become more common as more packages are added and R becomes more widely known. Perhaps these users are also less likely to buy books on R (which are probably more geared towards statistics), and perhaps also less likely to subscribe to the mailing list. However, I have no idea how to estimate the number of these users.... It seems to me that the number of downloads is most direct. What about the number of package updates? A package update (from within R) requires a working installation, and also a user who actually starts the update. And I suspect that even users who get it on CD would do an internet package update every now and again. Might be better than counting the number of downloads of the program itself. Cheers Stephan ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
