On 1/7/09, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Here is the same number of messages/posts data > for each of S, SAS, R: > - reworked into a 3 column ts class time series > - with Jan 2009 removed since its not complete > - leading and trailing NA rows removed
My software of choice is Stata, so here are compatible data from statalist (using http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/lwgate/STATALIST/archives/): ## Statalist traffic stata <- structure(c( 654,574,781, 848, 714, 823,1063,1057, 701,625,909, 799, 941,1052,1013,1269, 868,690,937,1155,1040,1113,1125,1252, 640,649,899, 898,1013,1161, 991,1325, 622,697,726,1102, 818,1077,1111,1374, 684,548,651, 876, 964, 963,1125,1078, 717,588,943, 923, 885, 892, 986,1200, 728,575,605, 901,1010,1011,1224,1396, 627,605,712, 807,1098, 951, 939,1446, 844,790,970, 940,1001,1283,1231,1509, 776,644,870, 928,1094, 928, 999,1340, 603,512,670, 824, 794, 951, 739,1056 ), .Dim = c(8L, 12L), .Dimnames = list(c("2001", "2002", "2003", "2004", "2005", "2006", "2007", "2008"), c("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", "Apr", "May", "Jun", "Jul", "Aug", "Sep", "Oct", "Nov", "Dec"))) The list existed from 1994 or 1996 or so, but the data are only available from 2001. You'd probably be surprised to find out that based on the list summaries, the size of Stata world is about half of SAS on the counts plot; and on the log scale, it shows linear (which means, exponential) growth throughout the range, while both SAS and R have been slowing down in the last couple of years (with an explanation already offered regarding the r-sig-* lists). Of course overall that's an incorrect comparison, to begin with. The support systems for all three packages are different: most (US) universities will have dedicated and well-certified SAS gurus answering most semicolon questions locally, while r-help would be the first thing on my mind if I cannot get what I need in the docs. I would thus expect traffic on r-help will to be heavier relative to the user base. Another measure of interest might be the number of contributed packages. The phrase for R is this: "Currently, the CRAN package repository features 1633 objects including 1625 packages and 8 bundles containing 34 packages, for a total of 1659 available packages." The phrase for Stata is this: "Statistical Software Components, Boston College Department of Economics: There are currently 1275 items in this series, of which 1274 are downloadable" (http://logec.repec.org/scripts/seriesstat.pl?item=repec:boc:bocode). So programming activity in Stata is about 3/4 of that in R at their face values (you would probably need to downplay both numbers for obsolete packages, though). Whether SAS has a unified repository of user contributed modules with direct counts available, I have no clue. A really good measure for R will be the total # of the downloads of r-base for all platforms from all CRAN mirrors (and I would expect that # can be found from the servers' logs). Given that it is so easy to download everything nice and clean and up to date, I would doubt anybody will be distributing CD-ROMs with R install files among friends and colleagues. SAS (and Stata, and SPSS, and Minitab, and...) should have their (internal) number of licenses sold (and yes those come on the disks initially), but those are badly blurred by the network licenses, and are commercial secrets, anyway. -- Stas Kolenikov, also found at http://stas.kolenikov.name Small print: I use this email account for mailing lists only. ______________________________________________ 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.