[R] popular R packages
David Winsemius
dwinsemius at comcast.net
Sun Mar 8 00:04:24 CET 2009
Quite so. It certainly is the case that Dirk Eddelbuettel suggested
would be very desirable and I think Dirk's track record speaks for
itself. I never said (and I am sure Dirk never intended) that one
could take the raw numbers as a basis for blandly asserting that
<nnnn> copies of <ttt> package are currently installed.
When I update packages, the automated process takes hold and I go for
a cup of coffee. I only have at the moment two computers with R
installed and have not updated any binary packages on Windoze in over
a year. Nonetheless, I do think the relative numbers of package
downloads might be interpretable, or at the very least, the basis for
discussions over beer.
--
David Winsemius
On Mar 7, 2009, at 5:45 PM, Thomas Adams 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
>
> David Winsemius wrote:
>> When the question arises "How many R-users there are?", the
>> consensus seems to be that there is no valid method to address the
>> question. The thread "R-business case" from 2004 can be found here:
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2004-March/047606.html
>>
>> I did not see any material revision to that conclusion during the
>> recent discussion of the New York Times article on the r-challenge
>> to SAS.
>>
>> Gmane tracks the number of r-help activity (I realize not what you
>> asked for):
>> http://www.gmane.org/info.php?group=gmane.comp.lang.r.general
>>
>> The distribution of r-packages is, well ... distributed:
>> http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
>>
>> 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. I have not heard of any such system being installed in the
>> mirror software and I see nothing that suggests data gathering in
>> the CRAN Mirror How-to:
>> http://cran.r-project.org/mirror-howto.html
>>
>> On the other hand I am not part of R-core, so you must await more
>> authoritative opinion since a 5 year-old thread and amateur
>> speculation is not much of a leg to stand on.
>>
>> There are lexicographic packages for R. One approach to a de novo
>> analysis would be to do some sort of natural language analysis of
>> the r-help archives counting up either package names with non-
>> English names or close proximity of the words "library" or
>> "package" to package names that overlap the 30,000 common English
>> words. That would have the danger of inflating counts of the
>> packages with the least adequate documentation or a paucity of good
>> worked examples, but there are many readers of this list who
>> suspect that new users don't look at the documentation, so who knows?
>>
>
>
> --
> Thomas E Adams
> National Weather Service
> Ohio River Forecast Center
> 1901 South State Route 134
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>
> EMAIL: thomas.adams at noaa.gov
>
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>
David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT
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