Friday, February 11, 2011

R overtakes SAS and Matlab in programming language popularity

R has been my primary data analysis software for years. It's simple, straightforward, easy to use and it has an unbelievable support system and infinitely extendable. Good to see this.

R bloggers

Tiobe Software ranks the popularity of programming languages based on references in search engines. While the methodology might be debated in terms of the absolute rankings it produces, it is quite interesting to see how the rankings fluctuate over time: Tiobe has produced a monthly report of rankings based on this methodology since 2001.

In the Tiobe Programming Community Index for February 2011, the top three slots are held by the general-purpose languages Java, C and C++. Domain-specific languages naturally fall farther down the list: in this months report, R is ranked at #25, with Matlab at 29 and SAS at 30. What's interesting is the movement: Matlab is down from #19 a month ago (and #20 a year ago), whereas R is up from #26. But look at SAS, mentioned in the report's summary as having "lost much ground": it's down from #16 a month ago and #14 a year ago. 

Tiobe Software: TIOBE Programming Community Index for February 2011

This post was kindly contributed by Revolutions - go there to comment and to read the full post.

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Lua shows a strong trend upwards the last couple of months. Most applications nowadays in the top of the iPhone app abundance are using Lua to define the application logic, including the popular Angry Birds app.

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