[R] # of users of R, and biological examples of the use of R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 20 Jun 2000, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:
> 
> > which indicates that 911 different e-mail addresses are subscribed to
> > the R mailing lists (very few of these are mailing lists; 
> > 		     however, also quite a few will be pointing to the same
> > 		     person)
> > 
> > Now, the mailing lists probably contain almost no undergraduate students,
> > and these *are* using R at least in many of the courses...
> > 
> > Further, graduate students and scientific staff in many organizations use R,
> > but only the more "aficionados" among them are subscribed to an R list.
> > [factor of 3 ?]
> > 
> > Other guesses?
> > 
> 
> Robert once guesstimated 10000 users, which would mean that roughly
> one in 10 signs up for mailing lists. That could well be the case, the
> mailing list traffic seems comparable to early days of s-news. 

Sounds plausible, and the MathSoft estimated ratio is more like 30 (but
then their user base will have a more hierarchical support structure).
As I don't know who here is signed up to R-help (but I do for S-news)
I am guessing a bit, but I'd say we had a 20:1 ratio (at uses R for several
hours per year) in my dept for each R and S.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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