popular R packages

From: Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com>
Subject: Re: [R] popular R packages
To: "Wacek Kusnierczyk" <Waclaw.Marcin.Kusnierczyk at idi.ntnu.no>
Cc: r-help at r-project.org, "Jeroen Ooms" <j.c.l.ooms at uu.nl>, "Thomas Adams" <Thomas.Adams at noaa.gov>
Date: Saturday, March 7, 2009, 5:22 PM
I just did RSiteSearch("library(xxx)") with xxx =
the names of 6 packages familiar to me, with the following
numbers of hits: 

hits package

169 lme4
165 nlme
  6 fda
  4 maps
  2 FinTS
  2 DierckxSpline
    
     Software could be written to (1) extract the names of
current packages from CRAN then (2) perform queries similar
to this on all such packages and summarize the results.  I
don't have the time now to write code for this, but
I've written similar code before for step (1);  it can
be found in "scripts/TsayFiles.R" in the
"FinTS" package on CRAN.  For step (2), Sundar
Dorai-Raj wrote code that is is included in the preliminary
"RSiteSearch" package available from R-Forge via
install.'packages("RSiteSearch",repos="http://r-forge.r-project.org")'.

     Code to do this could probably be written (a) in a
matter of seconds by many of those in the R Core team or (b)
in a matter of hours by virtually any reader of this list
using the examples I just cited.  And it could provide
numbers without a need to convince others to keep download
statistics and make them available later. 
     Hope this helps.      Spencer Graves    
Wacek Kusnierczyk wrote:

i have kept r installed on more than ten computers

during the past few

years, some of them running win + more than one linux

distro, all of

them having r, most often installed from a separate

download.

i know of many cases where students download r for the

purpose of a

course in statistics -- often an introductory course

for students who

otherwise have little to do with stats. some of them

do it more than

once during the semester, and many of them never use r

again.

taking into account that basic statistics courses are

taught to most

university students and that r is surely the most

popular free

statistical computing environment, download-based

usage estimates may be

a bit optimistic, unless 'usage' is taken to

include 'learn-pass-forget'.

vQ



Tal Galili wrote:
  

I agree with Thomas, over the years I have

installed R on at least 5

computers.

BTW: does any one knows how the website statistics

of r-project are

being analyzed?
Since I can't see any "google

analytics" or other tracking code in the main

website, I am guessing someone might be running

some log-file analyzer - but

I'd rather hear that then assume.






On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 12:45 AM, Thomas Adams

<Thomas.Adams at noaa.gov> wrote:

I don't think "At least one of the

participants in the 2004 thread

suggested that it would be a "good

thing" to track the numbers of downloads

by package." is reasonable because I

download R packages for 2 home

computers (laptop & desktop) and 2 at work

(1 Linux & 1 Mac). There must be

many such cases?

Tom