StackOverview is a popular Q&A site, and a go-to resource for developers of all languages to find answers to programming problems they may have: most of the time, the question has already been asked and answered, or you can always post a new question and wait for a reply. It's an excellent resource for R users, featuring answers to nearly 100,000 R questions. In fact, R is the fastest-growing language on StackOverflow in terms of the number of questions asked:
The chart above was created -- in R, of course -- by Joshua Kunst, who helpfully provided the R code to make this subway-style rank plot using the ggplot2 package. The "fastest-growing" claim is based on Joshua's regression analysis of the data above: R's trendline has a slope of 4.50. (RedMonk also uses StackOverflow data, combined with GitHub activity, for their bi-annual language popularity rankings. R was ranked #13 in their most recent analysis, in June 2015.) The data comes directly from the StackExchange data dump, loaded into a Sqlite database and processed in R using Hadley Wickham's RSQLite package. There's much more interesting analysis of the StackOverflow data in Joshua's blog post, including a cluster analysis of the top 100 tags in StackOverflow. Check it out at the link below.
Joshua Kunst: What do we ask in StackOverflow?
growth isn't always the result of good things. R has semantics and syntax fully at odds with the ALGOL/C lineage, and thus utterly opaque to folks who've lived with such languages. the number of questions/person is likely rather high; that's just a guess, of course. I suspect the drop-out rate for newbies in R to be rather high. the python cabal is making hay.
likewise, seeing the descent of xml is heartwarming, but could also mean that it has warped minds into its evil paradigm sufficiently that the infected no longer need guidance in its misuse. :)
Posted by: Robert Young | December 23, 2015 at 06:26
@Robert Young: I was thinking along the same lines. But I still see it as success for R when many try to comprehend it, although not all may succeed
Posted by: Andreas M | December 24, 2015 at 07:53
Please where is the data you use to show the examples on "New and updated geoms"?
I am a beginner and will like to follow your examples for my learning purposes. Thank you.
Posted by: atukue | December 31, 2015 at 13:20