{"id":8,"date":"2012-04-25T19:22:32","date_gmt":"2012-04-25T23:22:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/r4stats.wordpress.com\/?page_id=4"},"modified":"2023-08-02T09:13:54","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T13:13:54","slug":"popularity","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Popularity of Data Science Software"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\"><em>by Robert A. Muenchen<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Abstract<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>This article, formerly known as <em>The Popularity of Data Analysis Software<\/em>, presents various ways of measuring software popularity or market share for advanced analytics. Such software is also referred to as tools for data science, statistical analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and business analytics and is also a subset of business intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Updates:<\/strong> The most recent update was to the Scholarly Articles section on 06\/06\/2023. The Job Advertisement section was updated on 10\/10\/2022. Other sections date to 2019. I announce the updates to this article on Twitter:&nbsp; https:\/\/twitter.com\/BobMuenchen<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&nbsp;<strong>Introduction<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>When choosing a tool for data analysis, now more commonly referred to as analytics or data science, there are many factors to consider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Does it run natively on your computer?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Does the software provide all the methods you need? If not, how extensible is it?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Does its extensibility use its own unique language or an external one (e.g. Python, R) that is commonly accessible from many packages?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Does it fully support the style (programming, menus and dialog boxes, or workflow diagrams) that you like?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Are its visualization options (e.g., static vs. interactive) adequate for your problems?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Does it provide output in the form you prefer (e.g., cut &amp; paste into a word processor vs. LaTeX integration)?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Does it handle large enough data sets?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Do your colleagues use it so you can easily share data and programs?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Can you afford it?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The popularity of a given piece of data science software is a composite measure that combines all of the above considerations in a single measure. Popular software meets the needs of many. If that popularity is growing, then the software is probably continuing to compete well. If not, perhaps newer software with less market share is worth considering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are many ways to measure popularity or market share, and each has advantages and disadvantages. In rough order of the quality of the data, these include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Job Advertisements<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Scholarly Articles<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Programming Popularity Measures<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Surveys of Use<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>IT Research Firm Reports<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Software Rating Websites<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Books<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Blogs<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Discussion Forum Activity<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Sales &amp; Downloads<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Competition Use<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Growth in Capability<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s examine each of them in turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Job Advertisements<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the best ways to measure the popularity or market share of software for data science is to count the number of job advertisements highlighting knowledge of each as a requirement. Job ads are rich in information and are backed by money, so they are perhaps the best measure of how popular each software is now. Plots of change in job demand give us a good idea of what will become more popular in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.indeed.com\/\">Indeed.com<\/a> is the biggest job site in the U.S., making its collection of job ads the best around. As their &nbsp;co-founder and former CEO Paul Forster stated, Indeed.com includes \u201call the jobs from over 1,000 unique sources, comprising the major job boards \u2013 Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Craigslist \u2013 as well as hundreds of newspapers, associations, and company websites.\u201d Indeed.com also has superb search capabilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Searching for jobs using Indeed.com is easy, but searching for software in a way that ensures fair comparisons across packages is challenging. Some software is used only for data science (e.g., scikit-learn, Apache Spark), while others are used in data science jobs and, more broadly, in report-writing jobs (e.g., SAS, Tableau). General-purpose languages (e.g., Python, C, Java) are heavily used in data science jobs, but the vast majority of jobs that require them have nothing to do with data science. To level the playing field, I developed a protocol to focus the search for each software within only jobs for data scientists. The details of this protocol are described in a separate article, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/how-to-search-for-data-science-jobs\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">How to Search for Data Science Jobs<\/a><\/em>. All results in this section use those procedures to make the required queries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I collected the job counts discussed in this section on October 5, 2022. To measure percent change, I compare that to data collected on May 27, 2019. One might think that a sample on a single day might not be very stable, but they are. Data collected in 2017 and 2014 using the same protocol correlated r=.94, p=.002. I occasionally double-check some counts a month or so later and always get similar figures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The number of jobs covers a wide range from zero to 164,996, with a mean of 11,653.9 and a median of 845.0. The distribution is so skewed that placing them all on the same graph makes reading values difficult. Therefore, I split the graph into three, each with a different scale. A single plot with a logarithmic scale would be an alternative, but when I asked some mathematically astute people how various packages compared on such a plot, they were so far off that I dropped that approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Figure 1a shows the most popular tools, those with at least 10,000 jobs. SQL is in the lead with 164,996 jobs. SQL is not usually used for generating models, but it can apply them. It is worth including with job searches as it helps inform us of its value when seeking data science jobs. Next comes Python with\u00a0 150,992 and Java with 113,944. Then comes a set from C++\/C# at 48,555, slowly declining to Microsoft&#8217;s Power BI at 38,125. Tableau, one of Power BI&#8217;s major competitors, is in that set. Next comes R and SAS, both around 24K jobs, with R slightly in the lead. Finally, we see a set slowly declining from MATLAB at 17,736 to Scala at 11,473.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"300\" data-attachment-id=\"4390\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2022\/10\/12\/data-science-software-popularity-update\/fig-1a-indeedjobs-ge10k-1\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,300\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4390\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1a-IndeedJobs-ge10K-1-300x138.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 1a. Number of data science jobs for the more popular software (&gt;= 10,000 jobs).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Figure 1b covers tools for which there are between 250 and 10,000 jobs. Alteryx and Apache Hive are at the top, both with around 8,400 jobs. There is quite a jump down to Databricks at 6,117, then much smaller drops from there to Minitab at 3,874. Then we see another big drop down to JMP at 2,693 after which things slowly decline until MLlib at 274.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"700\" data-attachment-id=\"4401\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2022\/10\/12\/data-science-software-popularity-update\/fig-1b-indeedjobs-250-10k-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,700\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4401\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1b-IndeedJobs-250-10K-2-279x300.png 279w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 1b. Number of jobs for less popular data science software tools, those with between 250 and 10,000 jobs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The least popular set of software, those with fewer than 250 jobs, are displayed in Figure 1c. It begins with DataRobot and SAS&#8217; Enterprise Miner, both near 182. That&#8217;s followed by Apache Mahout with 160, WEKA with 131, and Theano at 110. From RapidMiner on down, there is a slow decline until we finally hit zero at Lasagne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"700\" data-attachment-id=\"4393\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2022\/10\/12\/data-science-software-popularity-update\/fig-1c-indeedjobs-lt250-1\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,700\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4393\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1c-IndeedJobs-lt250-1-279x300.png 279w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 1c. Number of jobs for software having fewer than 250 advertisements.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Several tools use the powerful yet easy workflow interface: Alteryx, KNIME, Enterprise Miner, RapidMiner, and SPSS Modeler. The scale of their counts is too broad to make a decent graph, so I have compiled those values in Table 1. There we see Alteryx is exceptionally dominant, with 30 times as many jobs as its closest competitor, KNIME. The latter is around 50% greater than Enterprise Miner, while RapidMiner and SPSS Modeler are tiny by comparison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Software<\/strong><\/td><td><strong>Jobs<\/strong>                              <\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Alteryx<\/td><td>8,566<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>KNIME<\/td><td>281<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Enterprise Miner<\/td><td>181<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>RapidMiner<\/td><td>69<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>SPSS Modeler<\/td><td>17<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Table 1. Job counts for workflow tools.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a similar look at packages whose traditional focus was on statistical analysis. They have all added machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, but their reputation still lies mainly in statistics. We saw previously that when we consider the entire range of data science jobs, R was slightly ahead of SAS. Table 2 shows jobs with only the term &#8220;statistician&#8221; in their description. There we see that SAS comes out on top, though with such a tiny margin over R that you might see the reverse depending on the day you gather new data. Both are over five times as popular as Stata or SPSS and ten times as popular as JMP. Minitab seems to be the only remaining contender in this arena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\"><strong>Software<\/strong><\/td><td><strong>Jobs only for &#8220;Statistician&#8221;<\/strong><\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">SAS<\/td><td>1040<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">R<\/td><td>1012<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">Stata<\/td><td>176<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">SPSS<\/td><td>146<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">JMP<\/td><td>93<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">Minitab<\/td><td>55<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">Statistica<\/td><td>2<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">BMDP<\/td><td>3<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">Systat<\/td><td>0<\/td><\/tr><tr><td class=\"has-text-align-center\" data-align=\"center\">NCSS<\/td><td>0<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Table 2. Number of jobs for the search term &#8220;statistician&#8221; and each software.<br><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Next, let&#8217;s look at the change in jobs from the 2019 data to now (October 2022), focusing on software that had at least 50 job listings back in 2019. Without such a limitation, software that increased from 1 job in 2019 to 5 jobs in 2022 would have a 500% increase but still would be of little interest. Percent change ranged from -64.0% to 2,479.9%, with a mean of 306.3 and a median of 213.6. There were two extreme outliers, IBM Watson, with job growth of 2,480%, and Databricks, at 1,323%. Those two were so much greater than the rest that I left them off of Figure 1d to keep them from compressing the remaining values beyond legibility. The rapid growth of Databricks has been noted <a href=\"https:\/\/growfers.com\/story\/databricks\">elsewhere<\/a>. However, I would take IBM Watson&#8217;s figure with a grain of salt as its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marketwatch.com\/press-release\/ibm-watson-services-market-size-share-2022-global-key-leaders-analysis-segmentation-growth-at-a-cagr-of-around-325-2022-09-08\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">growth in revenue<\/a> seems nowhere near what Indeed.com&#8217;s job figure seems to indicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The remaining software is shown in Figure 1d, where those whose job market is &#8220;heating up&#8221; or growing are shown in red, while those that are cooling down are shown in blue. The main takeaway from this figure is that nearly the entire data science software market has grown over the last 3.5 years. At the top, we see Alteryx, with a growth of 850.7%. Splunk (702.6%) and Julia (686.2%) follow. To my surprise, FORTRAN follows, having gone from 195 jobs to 1,318, yielding growth of 575.9%! My supercomputing colleagues assure me that FORTRAN is still important in their area, but HPC is certainly not growing at that rate. If any readers have ideas on why this could occur, please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"900\" data-attachment-id=\"4402\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2022\/10\/12\/data-science-software-popularity-update\/fig-1d-indeedjobs-2022-2-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,900\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4402\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Fig-1d-IndeedJobs-2022-2-217x300.png 217w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 1d. Percent change in job listings from March 2019 to October 2022. Only software that had at least 50 jobs in 2019 is shown. <strong>IBM (2,479.9%) and Databricks (1,322.6%) are excluded to maintain the legibility of the remaining values.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>SQL and Java are both growing at around 537%. From Dataiku on down, the rate of growth slows steadily until we reach MLlib, which saw almost no change. Only two packages declined in job advertisements, with WEKA at -29.9% and Theano at -64.1%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Scholarly Articles<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Scholarly articles provide a rich source of information about data science tools. Because publishing requires significant effort, analyzing the type of data science tools used in scholarly articles provides a better picture of their popularity than a simple survey of tool usage. The more popular a software package is, the more likely it will appear in scholarly publications as an analysis tool or even as an object of study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since scholarly articles tend to use cutting-edge methods, the software used in them can be a leading indicator of where the overall market of data science software is headed. Google Scholar offers a way to measure such activity. However, no search of this magnitude is perfect; each will include some irrelevant articles and reject some relevant ones. The details of the search terms I used are complex enough to move to a companion article,&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/how-to-search-for-data-science-articles\/\">How to Search For Data Science&nbsp;Articles<\/a><\/em>. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Figure 2a shows the number of articles found for the more popular software packages and languages (those with at least 4,500 articles) in the most recent complete year, 2022. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"650\" data-attachment-id=\"4691\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/fig_2a_scholarlyimpact2022-6\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,650\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4691\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6-300x300.png 300w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2a_ScholarlyImpact2022-6-150x150.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 2a. The number of scholarly articles found on Google Scholar for data science software. Only those with more than 4,500 citations are shown.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>SPSS is the most popular package, as it has been for over 20 years. This may be due to its balance between power and its graphical user interface&#8217;s (GUI) ease of use. R is in second place with around two-thirds as many articles. It offers extreme power, but as with all languages, it requires memorizing and typing code. GraphPad Prism, another GUI-driven package, is in third place. The packages from MATLAB through TensorFlow are roughly at the same level. Next comes Python and Scikit Learn. The latter is a library for Python, so there is likely much overlap between those two. Note that the general-purpose languages: C, C++, C#, FORTRAN, Java, MATLAB, and Python&nbsp;are included only when found in combination with data science&nbsp;terms, so view those counts as more of an approximation than the rest. Old stalwart FORTRAN appears last in this plot. While its count seems close to zero, that&#8217;s due to the wide range of this scale, and its count is just over the 4,500-article cutoff for this plot.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Continuing on this scale would make the remaining packages appear too close to the y-axis to read, so Figure 2b shows the remaining software on a much smaller scale, with the y-axis going to only 4,500 rather than the 110,000 used in Figure 2a. I chose that cutoff value because it allows us to see two related sets of tools on the same plot: workflow tools and menu\/dialog-box GUIs for the R language that makes them work much like SPSS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"1000\" data-attachment-id=\"4715\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2023\/06\/07\/update-to-data-science-software-popularity\/fig_2b_scholarlyimpact2022-8\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2b_ScholarlyImpact2022-8.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,1000\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_2b_ScholarlyImpact2022-8\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2b_ScholarlyImpact2022-8.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2b_ScholarlyImpact2022-8.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4715\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2b_ScholarlyImpact2022-8.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2b_ScholarlyImpact2022-8-195x300.png 195w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 2b. Number of scholarly articles using each data science software found using Google Scholar. Only those with fewer than 4,500 citations are shown.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/jasp\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the JASP Statistical Software\">JASP<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/jamovi\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the jamovi GUI for R\">jamovi<\/a> are both front-ends to the R language and are way out front in this category. The next R GUI is <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/r-commander\/\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the R Commander GUI for  R\">R Commander<\/a>, with half as many citations. Still, that&#8217;s far more than the rest of the R GUIs: <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/bluesky\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the BlueSky Statistics GUI for R\">BlueSky Statistics<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/rattle\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the Rattle GUI for R\">Rattle<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/rkward\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the RKWard GUI for R\">RKWard<\/a>,<a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/r-instat\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the R-Instat GUI for R\"> R-Instat<\/a>, and<a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/r-analyticflow\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"A Comparative Review of the R AnalyticFlow GUI for R\"> R AnalyticFlow<\/a>. While many of these have low counts, we&#8217;ll soon see that the use of nearly all is rapidly growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Workflow tools are controlled by drawing 2-dimensional flowcharts that direct the flow of data and models through the analysis process. That approach is slightly more complex to learn than SPSS&#8217; simple menus and dialog boxes, but it gets closer to the complete flexibility of code. In order of citation count, these include RapidMiner, KNIME, Orange Data Mining, IBM SPSS Modeler, SAS Enterprise Miner, Alteryx, and R AnalyticFlow. From RapidMiner to KNIME, to SPSS Modeler, the citation rate approximately cuts in half each time. Orange Data Mining comes next, at around 30% less. KNIME, Orange, and R Analytic Flow are all free and open-source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While Figures 2a and 2b help study market share now, they don\u2019t show how things are changing. It would be ideal&nbsp;to have long-term growth trend graphs for each software, but collecting that much data is too&nbsp;time-consuming. Instead, I\u2019ve collected data only for the years 2019 and 2022. This provides the data needed to study growth over that period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Figure 2c shows the percent change across those years, with the growing \u201chot\u201d packages shown in red (right side) and the declining or \u201ccooling\u201d ones shown in blue (left side). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"555\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"4716\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2023\/06\/07\/update-to-data-science-software-popularity\/fig_2c_scholarlyimpact2022-4\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,1200\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4-555x1024.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4-555x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4716\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4-555x1024.png 555w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4-163x300.png 163w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/Fig_2c_ScholarlyImpact2022-4.png 650w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 555px) 100vw, 555px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 2c. Change in Google Scholar citation rate from 2019 to the most recent complete year, 2022.          BlueSky (2,960%) and jamovi (452%) growth figures were shrunk to make the plot more legible.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Seven of the 14 fastest-growing packages are GUI front-ends that make R easy to use.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/software-reviews\/bluesky\/\">BlueSky\u2019s<\/a>&nbsp;actual percent growth was 2,960%, which I recoded as 220% as the original value made the rest of the plot unreadable. In 2022 the company released a Mac version, and the<a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2022\/09\/12\/mayo-clinic-adopts-bluesky-statistics\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&nbsp;Mayo Clinic announced<\/a>&nbsp;its migration from JMP to BlueSky; both likely had an impact. Similarly, jamovi\u2019s actual growth was 452%, which I recoded to 200. One of the reasons the R GUIs were able to obtain such high percentages of change is that they were all starting from low numbers compared to most of the other software. So be sure to look at the raw counts in Figure 2b to see the raw counts for all the R GUIs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The most impressive point on this plot is the one for PyTorch. Back on 2a we see that PyTorch was the fifth most popular tool for data science. Here we see it&#8217;s also the third fastest growing. Being big <em>and<\/em> growing fast is quite an achievement!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of the workflow-based tools, Orange Data Mining is growing the fastest. There is a good chance that the next time I collect this data Orange will surpass SPSS Modeler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The big losers in Figure 2c are the expensive proprietary tools: SPSS, GraphPad Prism, SAS, BMDP, Stata, Statistica, and Systat. However, open-source R is also declining, perhaps a victim of Python&#8217;s rising popularity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m particularly interested in the long-term trends of the classic statistics packages. So in Figure 2d, I have plotted the same scholarly-use data for 1995 through 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"650\" data-attachment-id=\"2233\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2017\/06\/19\/scholarly-articles\/fig_2d_scholarlyimpact2016\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,650\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2233\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2d_ScholarlyImpact2016-300x300.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 2d. The number of Google Scholar citations for each classic statistics package per year from 1995 through 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>SPSS has a clear lead overall, but now you can see that its dominance peaked in 2009, and its use is in sharp decline. SAS never came close to SPSS\u2019s level of dominance, and its usage peaked around 2010. GraphPad Prism followed a similar pattern, though it peaked a bit later, around 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Figure 2d, the extreme dominance of SPSS makes it hard to see long-term trends in the other software. To address this problem, I have removed SPSS and all the data from SAS except for 2014 and 2015. The result is shown in Figure 2e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"650\" data-attachment-id=\"2234\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/2017\/06\/19\/scholarly-articles\/fig_2e_scholarlyimpactsubset2016\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,650\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2234\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/Fig_2e_ScholarlyImpactSubset2016-300x300.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 2e. The number of Google Scholar citations for each classic statistics package from 1995 through 2016, with SPSS removed and SAS included only in 2014 and 2015. The removal of SPSS and SAS&nbsp;expanded&nbsp;scale makes it easier to see the rapid growth of the less popular packages.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Figure 2e shows that most of the remaining packages grew steadily across the time period shown. R and Stata grew especially fast, as did Prism until 2012. The decline in the number of articles that used SPSS, SAS, or Prism is not balanced by the increase in the other software shown in this graph. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These results apply to scholarly articles in general. The results in specific fields or journals are likely to differ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Programming Popularity <\/strong>Websites<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Several websites rank the popularity of programming languages. Unfortunately, they don&#8217;t differentiate between general-purpose languages and application-specific ones used for analytics. However, it&#8217;s easy to choose the few analytics languages for their results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The most comprehensive of these sites is the <a href=\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/top-programming-languages-2022\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">IEEE Spectrum Ranking<\/a>. This site combines 12 metrics from 10 different sites. These include measures discussed, such as popularity on job sites and search engines. They also include fascinating and useful objective measures, such as how much new programming code was added to the popular GitHub repository last year. Figure 3a shows their rankings for the most recent complete year, 2022:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"462\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"4752\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/ieee_spectrum_2022\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022.png\" data-orig-size=\"1162,2575\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"IEEE_Spectrum_2022\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-462x1024.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-462x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4752\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-462x1024.png 462w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-135x300.png 135w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-768x1702.png 768w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-693x1536.png 693w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022-924x2048.png 924w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/IEEE_Spectrum_2022.png 1162w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 462px) 100vw, 462px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 3a. IEEE Spectrum language popularity rankings. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>While Python is #1 and R is #8, it&#8217;s important to remember that Python is used for many other tasks than data science! SAS and MATLAB are #16 and #17, respectively. Julia is much farther down the list at #28. At the top of the plot is a button that lets you change the ranking to focus on jobs or on trends. You have to go to the website to activate those. Remember that their job rating is for all jobs, while my data is only for data science jobs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Redmonk<\/a> is another site that ranks the general popularity of programming languages. Figure 3b shows their plot for the first quarter of 2023 (they update these quarterly). It plots the number of projects using each language in the popular Github repository against the number of tagged comments on the discussion forum StackOverflow.com. To appear on this plot, the language must be present in both websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"845\" data-attachment-id=\"4757\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/redmonk-2023-q1\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1.png\" data-orig-size=\"1050,866\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"RedMonk-2023-Q1\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1-1024x845.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1-1024x845.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4757\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1-1024x845.png 1024w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1-300x247.png 300w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1-768x633.png 768w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/RedMonk-2023-Q1.png 1050w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 3b. Popularity of each software by appearance on GitHub and Stack Overflow.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We can see that Redmonk&#8217;s approach places Python at #2 and at around R at around #12. MATLAB and Julia appear to fall on the diagonal line at about the same place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tiobe.com\/index.php\/content\/paperinfo\/tpci\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TIOBE <\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tiobe.com\/tiobe-index\/\" title=\"\">Index<\/a> also ranks the popularity of programming languages. It extracts measurements from 25 popular search engines, including Google, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com, and combines their results into a single <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tiobe.com\/index.php\/content\/paperinfo\/tpci\/tpci_definition.htm\">index<\/a>. In their July 2023 index, they place Python #1, MATLAB #10 and R at #19. Julia and SAS are at #24 and #25 respectively. With monthly updates, TIOBE is the most current. However, there is an important limitation of the Tiobe Index: it searches for one single string: &#8220;X programming.&#8221; So if it didn&#8217;t find &#8220;SPSS programming,&#8221; then it doesn&#8217;t count. The complex searches I used for jobs and scholarly articles were far more helpful in estimating each package&#8217;s popularity. Another limitation of the Tiobe index is that it measures what is on the Internet now, so it&#8217;s a lagging indicator. There&#8217;s no way to plot trends without purchasing their data, which is quite expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another popularity index is <a href=\"https:\/\/pypl.github.io\/PYPL.html\" title=\"\">PYPL Popularity of Programming Language<\/a>. It searches on the single string, &#8220;X tutorial,&#8221; making it a leading indicator of what&#8217;s likely to be more popular in the future. Since their search string does not focus on data science, the result is for any use. Figure 3c shows the ranking in August 2023. With this approach, Python is still #1, R is #7, MATLAB is #14, and Julia is #25. They update it monthly, so click the link to see their latest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"821\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"4760\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/pypl-august-2023\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023.png\" data-orig-size=\"1250,1560\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"PYPL-August-2023\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023-821x1024.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023-821x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4760\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023-821x1024.png 821w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023-240x300.png 240w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023-768x958.png 768w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023-1231x1536.png 1231w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/PYPL-August-2023.png 1250w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 821px) 100vw, 821px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 3c. <a href=\"https:\/\/pypl.github.io\/PYPL.html\" title=\"\">PYPL Popularity of Programming Language<\/a> results from August, 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Software Rating Websites<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Compared to the other estimates of software popularity, software rating sites are relatively new. These include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/alternativeto.net\/\" title=\"\">AlternativeTo<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.capterra.com\/\" title=\"\">Capterra<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.g2.com\/\" title=\"\">G2<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.gartner.com\/peer-insights\/home\" title=\"\">Gartner Peer Insights<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.trustradius.com\/\" title=\"\">TrustRadius<\/a> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>The reviews at these sites tend to be just a paragraph or two. For a measure of popularity, it&#8217;s the number of reviews that are of interest. Volunteers write the reviews, sometimes in response to offers of gift cards. However, the numbers vary widely from site to site. For example, for SPSS, I found 841 reviews (the highest count) on G2, but only 22 on AlternativeTo. But on other software, G2 came out towards the bottom. This high variability makes this data fairly useless for estimating popularity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><span class=\"size-full wp-image-646\" title=\"Fig_9_PageRank\"><strong>IT Research Firms<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>IT research firms study software products and corporate strategies. For only the dozen or so largest companies, they survey customers regarding their satisfaction with the products and services and provide their analysis in reports that they sell to their clients. However, as the number of tools I cover via job and scholarly use has increased, these reports have become less relevant. So I dropped coverage of them here, but I may include them in future blog posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8212;&#8211; Construction Notice 8\/1\/2023 &#8212;&#8211;<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The sections above are up-to-date; the ones below report data that is several years old. I&#8217;ll be updating Surveys of Use next. Some of the other topics, such as numbers of books for each, I may not update.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Surveys of Use<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Survey data adds additional information regarding software popularity, but they are commonly done using &#8220;snowball sampling,&#8221; in which the survey provider tries to widely distribute the link, and then vendors vie to see who can get the most of their users to participate. So long as they all do so with equal effect, the results can be useful. However, the information is often limited because the questions are short and precise (e.g., &#8220;tools for data mining&#8221; or &#8220;program languages for data mining&#8221;) and responding requires just a few mouse clicks rather than the commitment required to place a job advertisement or publish a scholarly article, book, or blog post. As a result, it&#8217;s not unusual to see market share jump 100% or drop 50% in a single year, which is <em>very<\/em> unlikely to reflect changes in actual use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rexeranalytics.com\/\">Rexer Analytics<\/a>&nbsp;conducts a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rexeranalytics.com\/Data-Miner-Survey-2013-Intro.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">survey<\/a>&nbsp;of data scientists every other year, asking a wide range of questions regarding data science (previously referred to as data mining by the survey itself.) Figure 4a shows the tools that&nbsp;the 1,220&nbsp;respondents reported using in 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"647\" height=\"495\" data-attachment-id=\"1607\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015.png\" data-orig-size=\"647,495\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_6b_RexerSurveyAllTools2015\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"&lt;p&gt;Figure 6a. Analytics tools used.&lt;\/p&gt;\n\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1607\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015.png 647w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6b_rexersurveyalltools2015-300x230.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 647px) 100vw, 647px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 4a. Analytics tools used by respondents to the 2015 Rexer Analytics Survey. In this view, each respondent was free to check multiple tools.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We see that R has a more than 2-to-1 lead over the next most popular packages, SPSS Statistics and SAS. Microsoft&#8217;s Excel Data Mining software is slightly less popular, but note that it is rarely used as the primary tool. Tableau comes next, also rarely used as the primary tool. That&#8217;s to be expected as Tableau is principally a visualization tool with minimal capabilities for advanced analytics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The next batch of software appears at first to be all in the 15% to 20% range, but KNIME and RapidMiner are listed both in their free versions and, much further down, in their commercial versions. These data come from a &#8220;check all that apply&#8221; type of question, so if we add the two amounts, we may be overcounting. However, the survey also asked,&nbsp; &#8220;What <em>one<\/em> (my emphasis) data mining \/ analytic software package did you use most frequently in the past year?&#8221; &nbsp; Using these data, I combined the free and commercial versions and plotted the top 10 packages again in figure 4b. Since other software combinations are likely, e.g., SAS and Enterprise Miner; SPSS Statistics and SPSS Modeler; etc. I combined a few others as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"850\" height=\"550\" data-attachment-id=\"1606\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015.png\" data-orig-size=\"850,550\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_6a_RexerSurveyPrimaryTool2015\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"&lt;p&gt;Figure 6b. The percent of survey respondents who checked each package as their primary tool.&lt;\/p&gt;\n\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1606\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015.png 850w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/fig_6a_rexersurveyprimarytool2015-300x194.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 850px) 100vw, 850px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 4b. The percent of survey respondents who checked each package as their primary tool.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In this view, we see R even more dominant, with a 3-to-1 advantage compared to the software from IBM SPSS and SAS Institute. However, the overall ranking of the top three didn&#8217;t change. KNIME, however rises from 9th place to 4th. RapidMiner rises as well, from 10th place to 6th. KNIME has roughly a 2-to-1 lead over RapidMiner, even though these two packages have similar capabilities and both use a workflow user interface. This may be due to RapidMiner&#8217;s move to a more commercially oriented licensing approach. For free, you can still get an older version of RapidMiner or a version of the latest release that is <a href=\"https:\/\/rapidminer.com\/products\/comparison\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">quite limited<\/a> in the types of data files it can read. Even the academic license for RapidMiner is constrained by the fact that the company views &#8220;funded activity&#8221; (e.g., research done on government grants) the same as commercial work. The KNIME license is much more generous as the company makes its money from add-ons that increase productivity, collaboration, and performance rather than limiting analytic features or access to popular data formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The results of a similar poll done by the KDnuggets.com website in May 2015 are shown in Figure 4c. This one shows R in first place, with 46.9% of users reporting having used it for a &#8220;real project.&#8221; RapidMiner, SQL, and Python follow quite a bit lower, with around 30% of users. Then at around 20% are Excel, KNIME, and HADOOP. It&#8217;s interesting to see that these survey results reverse the order in the previous one, showing RapidMiner as being more popular than KNIME. Both are still the top two &#8220;point-and-click&#8221; type packages generally used by non-programmers.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/kdnuggests-2015.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"386\" height=\"947\" data-attachment-id=\"1550\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/kdnuggests-2015\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/kdnuggests-2015.png\" data-orig-size=\"386,947\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"KDnuggests 2015\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/kdnuggests-2015.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/kdnuggests-2015.png\" alt=\"KDnuggests 2015\" class=\"wp-image-1550\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/kdnuggests-2015.png 386w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/kdnuggests-2015-122x300.png 122w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 386px) 100vw, 386px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 4c. Percent of respondents that used each software in KDnuggets&#8217; 2015 poll. Only software with 5% market share is shown. The % alone is the percent of tool voters that used only that tool alone. For example, only 3.6% of R users have used only R, while 13.7% of RapidMiner users indicated they used that tool alone. Years are color-coded, with 2015, 2014, and 2013 from top to bottom.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>O&#8217;Reilly Media conducts an annual&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.oreilly.com\/ideas\/2016-data-science-salary-survey\">Data Science Salary Survey<\/a>, which also asks questions about analytics tools. Although the full report of results As their report notes, &#8220;O\u2019Reilly content\u2014in books, online, and at conferences\u2014is focused on technology, in particular new technology, so it makes sense that our audience would tend to be early adopters of some of the newer tools.&#8221; &nbsp;The results from their &#8220;over 600&#8221; respondents are shown in figures 6d and 6e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-top.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"625\" height=\"494\" data-attachment-id=\"1620\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/oreilly-2015-bottom-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom1.png\" data-orig-size=\"625,494\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"OReilly-2015-Bottom\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom1.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom1.png\" alt=\"OReilly-2015-Top\" class=\"wp-image-1620\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom1.png 625w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom1-300x237.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 625px) 100vw, 625px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 4d. Tools used by 2015 respondents to O&#8217;Reilly 2015 salary survey. The less popular tools among this audience are shown in the following figure.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"625\" height=\"494\" data-attachment-id=\"1619\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/oreilly-2015-bottom\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom.png\" data-orig-size=\"625,494\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"OReilly-2015-Bottom\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom.png\" alt=\"OReilly-2015-Bottom\" class=\"wp-image-1619\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom.png 625w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/oreilly-2015-bottom-300x237.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 625px) 100vw, 625px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 4e. The less popular tools used by the respondents of O&#8217;Reilly&#8217;s 2015 salary survey.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The O&#8217;Reilly results have SQL in first place, with 70% of users reporting it, followed closely by Excel. Python and R follow, seemingly tied for third place with 55%. However, Python also appears in 6th place with its subroutine libraries NumPy, etc., and R&#8217;s popular ggplot package appears in 7th place, with around 38% market share. The first commercial package with deep analytic capabilities is SAS, in 23rd place! &nbsp;This emphasizes that the O&#8217;Reilly sample is heavily weighted toward their usual open-source audience. Hopefully, in the future, they will advertise the survey to a wide audience and do so as more than just a salary survey. Tool surveys gain additional respondents since they are advertised by advocates of the various tools (vendors, fans, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Lavastorm, Inc. conducted a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lavastorm.com\/assets\/Lavastorm-Analytic-Survey-Results-2013.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">survey<\/a> of analytic communities, including LinkedIn\u2019s Lavastorm Analytics Community Group, Data Science Central, and KDnuggets. The results were published in March 2013, and the bar chart of &#8220;self-service analytic tool&#8221; usage among their respondents is shown in Figure 6f. Excel comes out as the top tool, with 75.6% of respondents reporting its use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>R comes out as the top advanced analytics tool, with 35.3% of respondents, followed closely by SAS. MS Access&#8217; position in 4th place is a bit of an outlier as no other surveys include it at all. Lavastorm comes out with 3.4%, while other surveys don&#8217;t show them at all. That&#8217;s hardly a surprise, given that the survey was aimed at Lavastorm&#8217;s LinkedIn community group.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/datasciencepopularity.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/lavastorm2013.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"981\" height=\"781\" data-attachment-id=\"1240\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/lavastorm2013\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/lavastorm2013.png\" data-orig-size=\"981,781\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Lavastorm2013\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"&lt;p&gt;Figure 7e. Lavastorm survey of analytics tools.&lt;\/p&gt;\n\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/lavastorm2013.png\" src=\"http:\/\/datasciencepopularity.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/lavastorm2013.png\" alt=\"Figure 7e. Lavastorm survey of analytics tools.\" class=\"wp-image-1240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/lavastorm2013.png 981w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/lavastorm2013-300x239.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 981px) 100vw, 981px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 4f. Lavastorm survey of analytics tools.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Books<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The number of books that include a software&#8217;s name in its title is particularly useful information since it requires a significant effort to write one, and publishers do their own study of market share before taking the risk of publishing. However, it can be difficult to do searches to find books that use general-purpose languages which also focus only on analytics. Amazon.com offers an advanced search method that works well for all the software except R and the general-purpose languages such as Java, C, and MATLAB. I did not find a way to easily search for books on analytics that used such general-purpose languages, so I&#8217;ve excluded them in this section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Amazon.com advanced search configuration that I used was (using SAS as an example):<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\">Title: SAS -excerpt -chapter -changes -articles&nbsp;\nSubject: Computers &amp;&nbsp;Technology\nCondition: New\nFormat: All formats\nPublication Date: After January, 2000<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p>The &#8220;title&#8221; parameter allowed me to focus the search on books that included the software names in their titles. Other books may use a particular software in their examples, but they&#8217;re impossible to search for easily. \u00a0SAS has many manuals for sale as individual chapters or excerpts. They contain \u201cchapter\u201d or \u201cexcerpt\u201d in their title, so I excluded them using the minus sign, e.g., \u201c-excerpt\u201d. SAS also has short \u201cchanges and enhancements\u201d booklets that the developers of other packages release only in the form of flyers and\/or web pages, so I excluded \u201cchanges\u201d as well. Some software listed brief &#8220;articles&#8221; which I also excluded. I searched on June 1, 2015, and I excluded excerpts, chapters, changes, and articles from all searches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;R&#8221; is a difficult term to search for since it&#8217;s used in book titles to indicate a Registered Trademark, as in &#8220;SAS(R)&#8221;. Therefore I verified all the R books manually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The results are shown in the table immediately below, where it&#8217;s clear that a very small number of analytics software packages dominate the world of book publishing. SAS has a huge lead with 576 titles, followed by SPSS with 339 and R with 240. SAS and SPSS both have many versions of the same book or manual still for sale, so their numbers are both inflated as a result. JMP and Hadoop both had fewer than half of R&#8217;s count, and then Minitab and Enterprise Miner had fewer than half again as many. Although I obtained counts on all 27 of the domain-specific (i.e., not general-purpose) analytics software packages or languages shown in Figure 2a, I cut the table off at software that had 8 or fewer books to save space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\"><strong>Software        Number of Books<\/strong> \nSAS                  576\nSPSS Statistics      339\nR                    240    [Corrected from blog post: 172]\nJMP                   97\nHadoop                89\nStata                 62\nMinitab               33\nEnterprise Miner      32<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Table 1. The number of books whose titles contain the name of each software package.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Blogs<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>On Internet blogs, people write about software that interests them, showing how to solve problems and interpreting events in the field. Blog posts contain a great deal of information about their topic, and although it\u2019s not as time-consuming as a book to write, maintaining a blog certainly requires effort. Therefore, the number of bloggers writing about analytics software has potential as a measure of popularity or market share. Unfortunately, counting the number of <em>relevant<\/em> blogs is often a difficult task. General-purpose software such as Java, Python, the C language variants, and MATLAB have many more bloggers writing about general programming topics than just analytics. But separating them out isn&#8217;t easy. The name of a blog and the title of its latest post may not give you a clue that it routinely includes articles on analytics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another problem arises from the fact that what some companies would write up as a newsletter, others would do as a set of blogs, where several people in the company each contribute their own blog. Those individual blogs may also be combined into a single company blog inflating the count further still. Statsoft and Minitab offer examples of this. So what&#8217;s really interesting is not company employees who are assigned to write blogs, but rather those written by outside volunteers. In a few lucky cases, lists of such blogs are maintained, usually by blog consolidators, who combine many blogs into a large &#8220;metablog.&#8221; All I have to do is find such lists and count the blogs. I don&#8217;t attempt to extract the few vendor employees that I know are blended into such lists. I only skip those lists that are exclusively employee-based (or very close to it). The results are shown here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\"><strong>         Number\nSoftware of Blogs Source<\/strong>\nR         550     <a href=\"http:\/\/www.r-bloggers.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">R-Bloggers.com<\/a>\nPython     60     <a href=\"http:\/\/planet.scipy.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SciPy.org<\/a>\nSAS        40     <a href=\"http:\/\/proc-x.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PROC-X.com<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sascommunity.org\/planet\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">sasCommunity.org Planet<\/a>\nStata      11     <a href=\"http:\/\/stata-bloggers.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Stata-Bloggers.com<\/a><\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">Table 2. &nbsp;Number of blogs devoted to each software package on April 7, 2014,<br>and the source of the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>R&#8217;s 550 blogs is quite an impressive number. For Python, I could only find that list of 60 that were devoted to the SciPy subroutine library. Some of those are likely to cover topics besides analytics but to determine which never covers the topic would be quite time-consuming. The 40 blogs about SAS is still an impressive figure, given that Stata was the only other company that even garnered a list anywhere. That list is at the vendor itself, StataCorp, but it consists of non-employees except for one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While searching for lists of blogs on other software, I did find individual blogs that at least occasionally covered a particular topic. However, keeping this list up to date is far too time-consuming, given the relative ease with which other popularity measures are collected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you know of other lists of relevant blogs, please let me know, and I&#8217;ll add them. If you&#8217;re a software vendor employee reading this, and your company does not build a metablog or at least maintain a list of your bloggers, I recommend taking advantage of this important source of free publicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Discussion Forum Activity<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Another way to measure software popularity is to see how many people are helping one another use each package or language. While such data is readily available, it, too, has its problems. Menu-driven software like SPSS or workflow-driven software such as KNIME are quite easy to use and tend to generate fewer questions. Software controlled by programming requires the memorization of many commands and requires more support. Even within languages, some are harder to use than others, generating more questions (see <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/why-r-is-hard-to-learn\/\">Why R is Hard to Learn<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another problem with this type of data is that there are many places to ask questions, and each has its own focus. Some are interested in a classical statistics perspective, while others have a broad view of software as general-purpose programming languages. In recent years, companies have set up support sites within their main corporate web site, further splintering the places you can go to get help. Usage data for such sites are not readily available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another problem is that it&#8217;s not as easy to use logic to focus on specific types of questions as it was with the data from job advertisements and scholarly articles discussed earlier. It&#8217;s also not easy to get the data over time to allow us to study trends. &nbsp;Finally, the things such sites measure include software group members (a.k.a. followers), individual topics (a.k.a. questions or threads), and total comments across all topics (a.k.a. total posts). This makes combining counts across sites problematic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two of the biggest sites used to discuss software are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">LinkedIn<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/quora.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Quora<\/a>. They both display the number of people who follow each software topic, so combining their figures makes sense. However, since the sites lack any focus on analytics, I have not collected their data on general-purpose languages like Java, MATLAB, Python, or variants of C. The results of data collected on 10\/17\/2015 are shown here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/crossvalidated_talkstats_20151.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"850\" height=\"350\" data-attachment-id=\"1686\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/crossvalidated_talkstats_2015-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/crossvalidated_talkstats_20151.png\" data-orig-size=\"850,350\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"CrossValidated_TalkStats_2015\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/crossvalidated_talkstats_20151.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/crossvalidated_talkstats_20151.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1686\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/crossvalidated_talkstats_20151.png 850w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/crossvalidated_talkstats_20151-300x124.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 850px) 100vw, 850px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 5a. Number of statistical questions or threads on Cross Validated and Talk Stats.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We see that R is the dominant software and that moving down through SAS, SPSS, and Stata results in a loss of roughly half the number of people in each step. Lavastorm follows Stata, but I find it odd that there was absolutely zero discussion of Lavastorm on Quora. The last bar that you can even see in this plot is the 62 people who follow Minitab. All the ones below that have tiny audiences of fewer than 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Next, let&#8217;s examine two sites that focus only on statistical questions: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talkstats.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Talk Stats<\/a>&nbsp;and <a href=\"http:\/\/stats.stackexchange.com\/\">Cross Validated<\/a>. They both report the number of questions (a.k.a. threads)&nbsp;for a given piece of software, allowing me to total their counts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"850\" height=\"550\" data-attachment-id=\"3813\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/linkedin_quora_2015-3\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015.png\" data-orig-size=\"850,550\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"LinkedIn_Quora_2015\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-3813\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015.png 850w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015-300x194.png 300w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/LinkedIn_Quora_2015-768x497.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 850px) 100vw, 850px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 5b. Number of members or followers on LinkedIn and Quora.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>We see that R has a 4-to-1 lead over the next most popular package, SPSS. Stata comes in at 3rd place, followed by SAS. The fact that SAS is in fourth place here may be due to the fact that it is strong in data management and report writing, which are not the types of questions that these two sites focus on. Although MATLAB and Python are general-purpose languages, I include them here because the questions on this site are within the realm of analytics. Note that I collected data on as many packages as were shown in the previous graph, but those not shown have a count of zero. Julia appears to have a count of zero due to the scale of the graph, but it actually had 5 questions on Cross Validated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Sales &amp; Downloads<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Sales figures reported by some commercial vendors include products that have little to do with analysis. Many vendors don&#8217;t release sales figures, or they release them in a form that combines many different products, making the examination of a particular product impossible. For open-source software such as R, you could count downloads, but one confused person can download many copies, inflating the total. Conversely, many people can use a single download on a server, deflating it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Download counts for the R-based Bioconductor project are located <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bioconductor.org\/packages\/stats\/\">here<\/a>. Similar figures for downloads of Stata add-ons (not Stata itself) are available <a href=\"http:\/\/fmwww.bc.edu\/fmrc\/reports\/Report.SSC.html\">here<\/a>.&nbsp; A list of Stata repositories is available <a href=\"http:\/\/stata.com\/links\/resources2.html\">here<\/a>. The many sources of downloads, both in repositories and individuals&#8217; websites makes counting downloads a very difficult task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Competition Use<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Kaggle.com is a website that sponsors data science contests. People post problems there along with the amount of money they are willing to pay the person or team who solves their problem the best. Both money and the competitors&#8217; reputations are on the line, so there&#8217;s strong motivation to use the best possible tools. <a title=\"Source of Figure 6\" href=\"http:\/\/www.kaggle.com\/wiki\/Software\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Figure 7<\/a> compares the usage of the top two tools chosen&nbsp;by the data scientists working on the problems. From April 2015 through July 2016, we see the usage of both R and Python growing at a similar rate. At the most recent time point, Python has pulled ahead slightly. Much more detail is available <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kaggle.com\/mlearn\/d\/kaggle\/meta-kaggle\/python-vs-r-as-seen-in-kaggle-scripts\/notebook\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div>\n<div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Kaggle2017.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"401\" height=\"358\" data-attachment-id=\"2156\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/kaggle2017\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Kaggle2017.png\" data-orig-size=\"401,358\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Kaggle2017\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Kaggle2017.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Kaggle2017.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-2156\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Kaggle2017.png 401w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Kaggle2017-300x268.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 401px) 100vw, 401px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 7. Software used in data science competitions on Kaggle.com in 2015 and 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<div>&nbsp;<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong title=\"Fig_9_PageRank\">Growth in Capability<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The capability of analytics software has grown significantly over the years. It would be helpful to be able to plot the growth of each software package\u2019s capabilities, but such data are hard to obtain. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstatsoft.org\/article\/view\/v073i02\/v73i02.pdf\">John Fox (2016)<\/a> acquired them for R\u2019s main distribution site <a href=\"http:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/\" rel=\"nofollow\">http:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/<\/a>&nbsp;for each version of R. To simplify ongoing data collection, I kept only the values for the last version of R released each year (usually&nbsp;in November or December), and collected data through the most recent complete year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These data are displayed in Figure 8. The right-most point is for version 3.2.3, released on 12\/10\/2015. The growth curve follows a rapid parabolic arc (quadratic fit with R-squared=.995).<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"650\" height=\"650\" data-attachment-id=\"1541\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/fig_9_cran\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran.png\" data-orig-size=\"650,650\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fig_9_CRAN\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran.png\" src=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran.png\" alt=\"Fig_9_CRAN\" class=\"wp-image-1541\" srcset=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran.png 650w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/fig_9_cran-300x300.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 650px) 100vw, 650px\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Figure 8. Number of R packages available on its main distribution site for the last version released in each year.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>To put this astonishing growth in perspective, let us compare it to the most dominant commercial package, SAS. In version 9.3, SAS contained around 1,200 commands that are roughly equivalent to R functions (procs, functions, etc., in Base, Stat, ETS, HP Forecasting, Graph, IML, Macro, OR, and QC). In 2015, R added 1,357 packages, counting only CRAN, or approximately 27,642 functions. During 2015 alone, R added more functions\/procs than SAS Institute has written <em>in its entire history<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Of course, while SAS and R commands solve many of the same problems, they are certainly not perfectly equivalent. Some SAS procedures have many more options to control their output than R functions do, so one SAS procedure may be equivalent to many R functions. On the other hand, R functions can nest inside one another, creating nearly infinite combinations. SAS is now out with version 9.4, and I have not repeated the arduous task of recounting its commands. If SAS Institute would provide the figure, I would include it here. While the comparison is far from perfect, it does provide an interesting perspective on the size and growth rate of R.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As rapid as R&#8217;s growth has been, these data represent only the main CRAN repository. R has eight other software repositories, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bioconductor.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bioconductor<\/a>, that are not included in Fig. 10. A program run on 4\/19\/2016&nbsp;counted 11,531&nbsp;R packages at all major repositories, 8,239 of which were at CRAN. (I excluded the GitHub repository since it contains duplicates to CRAN that I could not easily remove.)&nbsp;So the growth curve for the software at all repositories would be approximately 40% higher on the y-axis than the one shown in Figure 10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As with any analysis software, individuals also maintain their own separate collections available on their websites. However, those are not easily counted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What&#8217;s the total number of R functions? The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rdocumentation.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Rdocumentation<\/a> site shows the latest counts of both packages and functions on CRAN, Bioconductor, and GitHub. They indicate that there is an average of 19.78 functions per package. Given the package count of 11,531, as of 4\/19\/2016, there were approximately 228,103 total functions in R. In total, R has approximately 190 times as many commands as its main commercial competitor, SAS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>What&#8217;s Missing?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>I previously included graphs from Google Trends. That site tracks not what&#8217;s actually on the Internet via searches but rather the keywords and phrases that people are entering into their Google searches. That ended up being so variable as to be essentially worthless. For an interesting discussion of this topic, see <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.sas.com\/content\/iml\/2011\/08\/19\/estimating-popularity-based-on-google-searches-why-its-a-bad-idea\/\">this article<\/a> by Rick Wicklin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Website Popularity \u2013 in previous editions, I have included measures of this. However, as the corporate landscape has consolidated, we end up comparing huge companies with interests far outside the field of analytics (e.g., IBM) with relatively small focused ones, which no longer makes sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Conclusion<br><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Although the ranking of each package varies depending on the criteria used, we can still see major trends. Among the software that tends to be used as a collection of pre-written methods, R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata tend to always be toward the top, with R and SAS occasionally swapping places depending on the criteria used. I don&#8217;t include Python in this group as I rarely see someone using it exclusively to call pre-written routines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Among the software that tends to be used as a language for analytics, C\/C#\/C++, Java, MATLAB, Python, R, and SAS are always towards the top. I list those in alphabetical order since many of the measures cover not only use for analytics but for other uses as well. Among my colleagues, those who are more towards the computer science side of the data science field tend to prefer Python, while those who are more towards the statistics send tend to prefer R. A language worth mentioning is Julia, whose goal is to have syntax as clean as Pythons while maintaining the top speed reached by the C\/C#\/C++ group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A trend that I find very interesting is the rise of software that uses the workflow (or flowchart) style of control. While menu-driven software is easy to learn, it&#8217;s not easy to re-use the work. Workflow-driven software is almost as easy &#8212; the dialog boxes that control each node are almost identical to menu-driven software &#8212; but you also get to save and re-use the work. Software that uses this approach includes Alteryx, KNIME, RapidMiner, SPSS Modeler (the first to popularize this approach), and SAS Enterprise Miner. &nbsp;The wide use of this interface is allowing non-programmers to make use of advanced analytics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m interested in other ways to measure software popularity.&nbsp;&nbsp;If you have any ideas on the subject, please contact me at muenchen.bob@gmail.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you are a SAS or SPSS user interested in learning more about R, you might consider my book, <a title=\"R for SAS and SPSS&nbsp;Users\" href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/books\/r4sas-spss\/\"><em>R for SAS and SPSS Users<\/em><\/a>. Stata users might want to consider reading <a title=\"R for Stata&nbsp;Users\" href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/books\/r4stata\/\"><em>R for Stata Users<\/em><\/a>, which I wrote with Stata guru <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Joseph_Hilbe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Joe Hilbe<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Acknowledgments<br><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>I am grateful to the following people for their suggestions that improved this article: John Fox (2009) provided the data on R package growth; Marc Schwartz (2009) suggested plotting the amount of activity on e-mail discussion lists; Duncan Murdoch clarified the pitfalls of counting downloads; Martin Weiss pointed out both how to query Statlist for its number of subscribers; Christopher Baum provided information regarding counting Stata downloads; John (Jiangtang) HU suggested I add more detail from the TIOBE index;&nbsp; Andre Wielki suggested the addition of SAS Institute&#8217;s support forums; Kjetil Halvorsen provided the location of the expanded list of Internet R discussions; Dario Solari and Joris Meys suggested how to improve Google Insight searches; Keo Ormsby provded useful suggestions regarding Google Scholar; Karl Rexer provided his data mining survey data; Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro provided his KDnuggets data mining poll; Tal Galili provided advice on blogs and consolidation, as well as Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow; Patrick Burns provided general advice; Nick Cox clarified the role of Stata&#8217;s software repositories and of popularity itself; Stas Kolenikov provided the link of known Stata repositories; Rick Wicklin convinced me to stop trying to get anything useful out of Google Insights; Drew Schmidt automated some of the data collection; Peter Hedstr\u00f6m greatly improved my search string for Stata; Rudy Richardson pointed out that GraphPad Prism is widely used for statistical analysis; Josh Price and Janet Miles provided expert editorial advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Bibliography<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>J. Fox. Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project. <em>R Journal<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/journal.r-project.org\/archive\/2009-2\/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf\" rel=\"nofollow\">http:\/\/journal.r-project.org\/archive\/2009-2\/RJournal_2009-2_Fox.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>R. Ihaka and R. Gentleman. R: A language for data analysis and graphics. <em>Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics<\/em>, 5:299\u2013314, 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>R. Muenchen, <a href=\"http:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/r4statistics\/books\/r4sas-spss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>R for SAS and SPSS Users<\/em><\/a>, Springer, 2009<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>R. Muenchen, J. Hilbe, <a href=\"http:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/r4statistics\/books\/r4stata\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><em>R for Stata Users<\/em><\/a>, Springer, 2010<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>M. Schwartz, 1\/7\/2009, <a href=\"http:\/\/tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au\/R\/e6\/help\/09\/01\/0517.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">http:\/\/tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au\/R\/e6\/help\/09\/01\/0517.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Trademarks<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/alpinenow.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Alpine<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alteryx.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Alteryx<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/http:\/\/www.angoss.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Angoss<\/a>, Microsoft&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/C_Sharp_%28programming_language%29\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">C#<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.statistical-solutions-software.com\/bmdp-statistical-software\/bmdp\/\">BMDP<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www-01.ibm.com\/software\/analytics\/spss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">IBM SPSS Statistics<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ibm.com\/software\/analytics\/spss\/products\/modeler\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">IBM SPSS Modeler<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.infocentricity.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">InfoCentricity Xeno<\/a>, Oracle&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.java.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Java<\/a>, SAS Institute&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jmp.com\/software\/\">JMP<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.knime.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">KNIME<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lavastorm.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Lavastorm<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mathworks.com\/products\/matlab\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mathworks&#8217; MATLAB<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.megaputer.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Megaputer&#8217;s PolyAnalyst<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.minitab.com\">Minitab<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncss.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NCSS<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.python.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Python<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.r-project.org\/\">R<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/rapidminer.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">RapidMiner<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/www.sas.com\">SAS<\/a>, <a href=\"www.sas.com\/en_us\/software\/analytics\/enterprise-miner.html\u200e\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SAS Enterprise Miner<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salford-systems.com\/products\/spm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Salford Predictive Modeler (SPM) etc.<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kxen.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SAP&#8217;S KXEN<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stata.com\/products\/\">Stata<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.statsoft.com\/\">Statistica<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.systat.com\/\">Systat<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.waikato.ac.nz\/ml\/weka\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">WEKA <\/a>\/ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pentaho.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Pentaho<\/a> have registered trademarks of their respective companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Copyright 2010-2022 Robert A. Muenchen, all rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Robert A. Muenchen Abstract This article, formerly known as The Popularity of Data Analysis Software, presents various ways of measuring software popularity or market share for advanced analytics. Such software is also referred to as tools for data science, statistical analysis, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and business analytics and is also a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/articles\/popularity\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Popularity of Data Science Software<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":40,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":true,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P6TIhK-8","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":108,"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4771,"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8\/revisions\/4771"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/r4stats.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}