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) <muenc...@utk.edu> wrote: > > >>-----Original Message----- >>From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org > [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] >>On Behalf Of Ted Harding >>Sent: Sunday, June 20, 2010 3:42 PM >>To: r-help@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.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> >>Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 >>Date: 20-Jun-10 Time: 20:41:43 >>------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ >> >>______________________________________________ >>R-help@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. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@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. > ______________________________________________ R-help@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.