On Jun 20, 2010, at 10:24 AM, Stefan Grosse wrote:
Am 20.06.2010 15:31, schrieb Muenchen, Robert A (Bob):
I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the
popularity
of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-
PLUS,
R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've
come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure
people
will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me
know
what you think.
Your analysis is quite web-based. But to define what popular means
is -
I believe - hard. R is open source and very broad in its different
applications so of course it generates much more e-mail and web
traffic
because there are many different uses and users.
SPSS and Stata for example are closed and very specialized.
I suspect proponents of their use would actively dispute the "very
specialized" description.
You get
support also directly from the company and do not necessarily need a
mailing list. Does this mean that they are less popular? I'd say no.
I was under the impression that both SAS and Stata actively support
their two mailing lists, but the SAS FAQ disputes this impression
regarding SAS.
So the question I would raise here is whether it is a fair comparison?
I know that is a sufficient statistics-subset like panel econometrics
Stata is by far leading and for time series econometrics Eviews, Gauss
in research. I would say that in the industry that I know plus in
econometrics research those programs are much more widespread or
"popular". To measure their popularity I would say a
industry-and-education-wide-questionnaire should be used.
Plus it is not sufficient so I would also name Matlab, Gauss, Ox,
Eviews
from the areas of my "interest" (econometrics) as "popular"
proprietary
software.
I do not deny that R is becoming more popular, but I doubt whether
mailing lists and search requests are enough to prove this hypothesis.
Certainly there are additional factors that might influence the
absolute numbers of posting to a particular mailing list. The SAS
mailing list/newsgroup, SAS-L/comp.soft-sys.sas, has a well-
established Internet presence. Each one probably has a particular
culture. (I was stunned to see the low number of daily posts to
comp.soft-sys.sas when I just looked at the last week on
GoogelGroups.) I didn't think either the SAS or the Stata lists had
any sort of published or informal effort to steer users in the
direction of R-ing the FM, searching-before-posting, or admonishments
to RT-FAQ. However, now that I look, it does appear that the
Statalist FAQ makes an effort similar to that of the r-help Posting
Guide. There may be differences in the degree and clarity of the
documentation as well. The Stata distribution includes a medium-sized
library. All of that said, ..., the relative frequency of postings
would seem to less subject to such influences.
The SAS curve with its peak in 2006-2008 and significantly lower
numbers in more recent years contrasted with the steady increase in R
and Stata would seem to reflect a material shift. Agreed, you cannot
say that R passed SAS in number of active users, or that SAS has the
same number of users as Stata. The flatness of SPSS also appears
meaningful. And within the R/S world the differences in the activity
on Snews and rhelp are likewise pretty dramatic.
--
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT
______________________________________________
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.
