Plaudits for R

• One from Richard Condit about the use of R (for Windows) in developing countries.
• One from Woodrow Setzer about the use of R in a public health project.
• A reference to a review in the Journal of Applied Economics.
• An email summarising replies to a quick survey on where and how R is being used (12/11/01).
• Evidence that R is being used in Japan.
• Evidence that R is being used in China.
• Some advertisements for commercially-offered courses providing training for R: introductory course, fundamentals and programming course, and comparison to SAS course.
• A survey done by a drug company on the use of R.
• Microarray analysis software called GeneTraffic built on R.
• A pointer to the start of a thread on the R-help mailing list discussing a comparison of SAS and R -- lots of lovely comments about R's graphics (actually S-style graphics generally, but some of it rubs off).
• An email from someone researching the success of Open Source projects.
• An email referring to an acknowledgement to R in the preface of a book.
• An email applauding the cross-platform-ness of R.
• An email from Richard Rowe explaining why I got the 2001 bottle of scotch whiskey.
• An email with a link to a document (in Spanish) on statistical graphics using R -- seems to have some interesting examples of using my layout() function.
• An email from Kjetil Kjernsmo including his PhD acknowledgement to the R-core team.
• An email mentioning a report that praises the virtues of Open Source software (although not R specifically) for its ability to allow others to reproduce analyses. Significant because it all relates to the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president.
• An email from Frank Harrell announcing the release of Hmisc and acknowledging grid and lattice .
• A couple of emails praising R's cross-platformness: 1, 2.
• An email from Insightful (sellers of S-Plus) advertising a course on S-Plus with explicit reference to R users.
• A reasonably representative example of the occasional response we get after a release from a satisfied "customer" :)
• An email that refers to a web site called the VENTILATION CLIMATE INFORMATION SYSTEM, which produces plots using R (even though they don't seem to say that on the web site).
• Some CRAN download statistics from Fritz (30/5/02).
• An announcement about a book on R and S-Plus by John Fox.
• An email discussing R's speed performance relative to other numerical/mathematical/statistical packages.
• An email that points to a US Army call for proposals to develop a software application using R.
• An email mentioning possible intention to create a SAS simulator in R.
• A web site that sells printed copies of "An Introduction to R" (proceeds to support free software development).
• An email referring to a comparison between gnuplot and R graphics (in Czech).
• Brian Ripley's `Opening Plenary' lecture for RSS2002 mentions importance of Open Source and example of where R is being using in Bolivia.
• A general thanks from a user who has "just crested the learning curve" with R.
• Nothing to do with me directly, but an excellent and well-deserved tribute to R's package install design.
• A general kudos for R (with particular mention of "why buy S-Plus?").
• A notice that R is now included on a CD of GNU software for Windows.
• An email from a guy (in NZ) who maintains a GenStat add-on called dataload. This is for converting many different file formats to GenStat format. He has "been requested by my users to add R to this".
• An RFC from someone changing from SAS to R/S-Plus. Favourable comparisons of SAS with R/S-Plus.
• Some contributed code for polar plots from Karsten Dalsgaard Bjerre. Preamble describes problems with SigmaPlot that illustrate potential constraints imposed by commercial, closed-source software.
• An article in Bio.IT World on Bioconductor with lots of nice things to say about R.
• The short courses at the University of Hertfordshire Business School Statistical Services & Consultancy Unit. Includes a short course on R.
• Mention of interest generated by PL/R (R plug-in for PostgreSQL. Also, an article on using PL/R to create graphs from PostgreSQL.
• Mention of R in Science(!)
• Martin Maechler's input to the discussion on where R is being used.
• A piece of biostats software called Brodgar that links to R.
• A summary of some information on where R is used (based on email domains of subscribers to R-help).
• A message from the President of the Statistical Society of Canada announcing Robert Gentleman's invited address; talks about why R is so useful and talks about the need for greater recognition for the developers of statistical software.
• An article on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com describing why a user migrated from Matlab to R (and Octave). And an R user's comparison of R and Matlab.
• An email from a not-atypical discussion of whether/why to switch from S-Plus to R, including comments on in what ways the emailer thinks R will improve faster.
• An article from the NZ Herald (09/06/03).
• A favourable IBM developerWorks article on R.
• A large LinuxUser article on R. First in a series?? (subsequent ones to "explore some of the exquisite high-level graphics functions"?).
• A project on Design Theory (e.g., for experimental design), which is implementing for R.
• In September 2003, the IMS became a benefactor of the R Foundation.
• An issue of The Political Methodologist with three articles on the use of R in Political Science.
• An excerpt from Eric Raymond's book on Unix programming which mentions R.
• Frank Harrell's comparison of S and SAS for analysis of data from clinical trials.
• Some positive words about the quantity and quality of documentation for R. And more of the same.
• A mention of R in ComputerWorld.
• In January 2004, Merck Research Labs made a significant financial contribution to the R Foundation.
• Evidence of significant user base in Japan (RjpWiki) and Brazil (a discussion list).
• Mention of R (Stefano's Mac OS X port) in an O'Reilly book on "Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks".
• Evidence of the strong user base in France: Enseignements de Statistique and Staistiques avec R.
• A tribe has been started for R (see Tribe.net). Apparently there's something similar on Orkut called R-project.
• A blog maintained by a "Supporting Institution" of the R Foundation, Loyalty Matrix.
• An email announcing the creation of the Oregon R User's Group.
• An email announcing the release of a major study data set as an R package.
• A standard look-what-our-customers-think-of-us email.
• A link to the first of a three-part developerworks (IBM developer's resource) column on R.
• Mention of R 2.0.0 release in Linux Weekly News.
• Some links to R documentation in french.
• Not a plaudit - something that R graphics could do better. An advantage of S-Plus graphics
• The start of a discussion about whether R should or even can have an effective GUI, motivated by this article in Scientific Computing World.
• The start of a thread discussing getting R info on SourceForge. Plenty of mentions of other software that builds on or works with R.
• The start of another R versus SAS thread.
• Part of a very large thread on whether R-help should be more welcoming (less rude); potentially useful statement of support for the significance of effort put into the support of R.
• A grid-and-lattice tribute from John Maindonald.
• A slashdot thread on mathematical software; R (and Quantian) get a mention.
• Someone who prefers gnuplot to R's graphics (blasphemy!)
• The head of an interesting R-help thread on "why should you trust R?"
• "Mention" of R in one of Apple's marketing videos.
• The journal "Sys Admin" had an article on "Using the R System for Systems Administration".
• An article on Dirk's Quantian distro in Linux Magazine (R gets a mention).
• Part of a thread just after the release of R 2.1.0, which started as a typical "thanks for R" from a happy user and developed into "should universities be teaching R or SAS (or Excel)?". This particular node in the thread mentions importance of R in developing countries.
• Evidence of R being used in Russia.
• Message announcing the translation into Chinese (or plans thereto) of the R manuals.
• A quotable quote from an R-help message, which describes R as: "the most important contribution to data analysis and statistical practice since Fisher." (!)
• A spontaneous testimony from a satisfied user.
• (From the BioConductor web site ...) R and BioConductor are profiled in a recent article about mathematical software for scientific research. "Biology by the Numbers", Jeffrey M. Perkel, The Scientist, 19 (12), 2005.
• Advertising for a course by Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani. FTA: "All our examples are developed using the S language, and most of the procedures we discuss are implemented in publically available R packages."
• A site showing the current status of the various translations of R messages (a measure of the international usage of R). At the time this was recorded, major translations included Russian, Italian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, Japanese, French, German, and Brazilian Portguese.
• An email announcing an ISO of R live on CD (also first time I have seen something indicating R usage in Indonesia[?]).
• An article on R on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com which presumably led to the spike in R accesses/downloads noted by Duncan Murdoch (copies of US CRAN mirror transfer stats and CRAN visitors for mid November.) UPDATE: may just have been a blip at the US mirror in general (some sort of spam attack?) because the Apache stats show the same blip (and there was no corresponding increase in R-help traffic).
• A UCLA Technical Report comparing various statistics packages. Has some unhappy things to say about the steep learning curve for R. Initiated a long discussion on R-help (see also continuing threads with subject "A comment about R"). Patrick Burns has composed a formal "comment" in response.
• Plots of traffic on R-help by Paul Sorenson.
• Proposal to set up a network of R consultants in Ohio.
• Advertising for a R course in Estonia(!)
• A list of evidence of R use in "credible" companies, institutions, and agencies (from a thread on R-help: "Justifying R to anti open-source management").
• Just for my own reference: look for an email from John W Emerson in dataExpo2006 mail folder for a nice sound-bite on grid.
• An update from Martin Maechler on the number of people signed up for R-help.
• A nice summary of the reasons for using R from Spencer Graves.
• Evidence of the use of R in China.
• There are now one or two companies offering commercial support for R.
• A pointer to the LabSynch project for "collaborative bench science", which uses R as a statistical/graphics engine. I particularly like the expression "LAMP+R".
• A comparison of R with SAS and SPSS by Robert (Bob) A Muenchen.
• Announcement of a local R mailing list in South Africa.
• Article titled "Successfully Creating and Presenting Graphics" in SysAdmin (The journal for UNIX and Linux administrators) that does everything with R graphics.
• A substantial-looking Excel add-in for Micoranalysis based on R (and some other things).
• A Slashdot thread on "Custom Charts w/ Perl and GD"; the discussion contains a couple of mentions of R.
• There is an R-Project page for the Sun Grid Project.
• There is now a weblog aggregator for R called Planet R (a la Planet Apache, Planet GNOME, etc).
• Dirk Eddelbuettel's brilliantly reasoned estimate of the number of users of R.
• A reference to a Windows blog that describes how to avoid the Excel numerical errors by using R.
• A nice gushy testament from an R user.
• An email from Antony Unwin describing the University-wide interest in R at Augsburg.
• An Intel new release announcing their investment in REvolution (a company providing commercial support and enhancement of R).
• A Dashboard Insight article on R graphics.
• Mention of R on Freakonomics blog (though it does claim [without basis] that R will not be as up-to-date on cutting-edge methods!!!)
  update: (a few short hours later) a number of people have placed comments that put the record straight.
• Further evidence of the use of R in France.
• An article on R from the New York Times (plus a follow-up in the esteemed New Zealand Herald!). This all probably happened after Ross Ihaka was awarded the Pickering Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
• The Debian Linux distribution has awarded R the same status as Perl, PHP, and Python.
• A number of localized R User Groups are starting to pop up (another announcement listing several others [check out the size of some of these!] and a sub-Saharan Africa R user's forum for French speakers and another user group in London). The R wiki and the Revolution blog are maintaining lists of these user groups.
• There is now an R-help mailing list for spanish speakers.
• Another New York Times article with a brief mention of R.
• The Ohloh R page, with an interesting calculation of the project cost at bottom right(!)
• A blog post by Hal Varian (Google Chief Economist) about an article "Predicting the Present with Google Trends" that uses R.
• The first R conference for spanish speakers.
• The 2nd Chinese R Conference.
• According to Intelligent Enterprise, R is one of the "companies to watch" for 2010 (!)
• Mention of R in The Economist.
• Bob Muenchen's effort at measuring The Popularity of Analytical Software.
• The book R in a Nutshell gets reviewed on Slashdot.
• Ross has been presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the NZ Open Source something or other.
• Article on R in Forbes
• Henrik Bengtsson's marking of 3000 packages on CRAN.
• R has made the Top 20 on TIOBE Programming Community Index for popularity of programming languages.
• Description of use of R graphics for a NYT info graphic.
• R graphics used in Facebook IPO, cool designer-look cycle route map, and Science papers (see first link again).
• R is the most popular Programming Language in Bioinformatics ?
• R graphics used in fancy data visualisations called Timeplots (Nathaniel Pearlman)
• R used in "famous" facebook world map.
• Oracle Expands Support For Open Source R Language
• The Big Boys all want to talk to R (Oracle, SAS, Mathematica, ...)
• As of April 2013, there were 112 R User Groups scattered all over the world.
• The CRAN Mirror Monitor provides useful info on the status of CRAN mirrors (including how many CRAN mirrors there are!)
• RStudio are now providing package download logs for their CRAN mirror
• Business Times article that describes R skills as "rapidly shifting from 'niche' to 'standard' requirements in today's world".
• Revolution Analytics Awarded Top Innovator for Data Visualization from DataWeek.
• R "Top Languages for analytics, data mining, data science" (for third year running), at least according to KDnuggets
• Richie Cotton's blog posts on alternative R engines: Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3
• Rexer Analytics survey places R as most popular Data Mining tool.
• A survey by Dice.com says that "top-earning skill [for technology professionals] is R".
• An O'Reilly survey (registration required) of Strata conference attendees has SQL as by far the most common tool (71%), but R next (43%).
• IEEE ranks R as #9 most popular programming language (!)
• TIOBE ranks R as #12 most popular programming language (!)
• Article in Nature about success of R.
• Microsoft has bought Revolution Analytics.
• The latest info on R's popularity (as of April 2016).
• R moves up to fifth position in the IEEE Top Ten Programming Languages list (behind only C, Java, Python, and C++).