The site githut.info provides quarterly statistics on programming language activity on GitHub, by number of repositories, pushes, forks etc. Ranked by number of active repositories on GitHub, R is the 12th most popular programming language as of Q4 2014. JavaScript, Java and Python appear as the top 3 in the same list.
As I've said before, such a high ranking for a domain-specific language like R is quite an achievement. Also of note (as pointed out by Stephen Turner), R ranks highest in number of new forks per repository, which indicates that the R code is being actively used and modified by users.
which indicates that the R code is being actively used and modified by users.
In fact it indicates that this statistics is mislead by an artifact: https://github.com/rdpeng/ProgrammingAssignment2
Look at the number of forks here....
Posted by: Gabor | February 11, 2015 at 10:56
And how much of this is due to the basic R programs created as part Data Science specialisation on Coursera?
Posted by: Navneeth | February 12, 2015 at 00:36
I agree that this is very much due to coursera. Many of the course projects require you to fork their repo.
Posted by: Jason | February 13, 2015 at 19:02
At least my fork is included
Posted by: Dorcas | February 19, 2015 at 08:27
Yup that is surely due to course era.
Posted by: Muhammad Qamar | February 24, 2015 at 01:54
But Coursera MOOC's on other programming languages also could require forking.
Posted by: Alexander Matrunich | March 12, 2015 at 03:21