[R] popular R packages

[hadley wickham]

>> I question 1) the usefulness of the effort necessary to get the data ;
>> and 2) the very concept of data mining, which seems to be the rationale
>> for this proposed effort.
>>
>> Furthermore (but this is seriously off-topic), I seriously despise the
>> very idea of "popularity" in scientific debates... "Everybody does it"
>> is *not* a valid argument. Nor "Everyone knows...".
>
>  As long as we agree that pacakge downloads != popularity then we have
> useful data.
>
>  Usefulness of the data? Let's think...
>
>  Suppose we discover that spatstat is downloaded 100 times more than
> splancs is. Both packages compute K-functions of spatial data. Pretend
> there's an enhancement to K-function computation that could be
> implemented in spatstat and/or splancs. Why bother doing it in
> splancs?
>
>  Currently the only usage stats we have are even worse measures such
> as number of mentions in R-help or number of bug reports. Or maybe
> citation counts, but who would make important decisions based on
> those?
>
>  I'd love to go 'Hmmm how many people are using my package?' and get
> an exact answer. Given the impossibility of that information, I'd love
> to go 'Hmmm how many people downloaded my package?', a good
> approximation to which is not beyond the bounds of our technology. Web
> pages have had annoying 'this piece of software has been downloaded
> 443535 times' banners (often enclosed in <blink> tags) since 1996.Yes
> it would require some effort at each CRAN site, but maybe the CRAN
> mirror site maintainers might be interested in doing this. If they
> don't want to, then fine.

Here's a few either uses that I would put the data to:

 * In my tenure case, grant applications etc, I can say how many
people have downloaded my packages.

 * If relatively few people are using a package, I'd know that I
either need to promote the package more, or improve it so that it is
useful to more people.

 * At a higher level, it would be interesting to see what types of
packages are most frequently download.  Modelling packages? Graphics
packages? Packages for particular applications? ...

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/