The Impressive Growth of R
We found in a previous post that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing programming language in terms of Stack Overflow visits.
The same analysis showed that that the R programming language has shown remarkable growth in the last five years as well. In fact, R is growing at a similar rate to Python in terms of a year-over-year percentage, though this growth is “easier” because it started from a smaller share of traffic.
In another post, we found that much of the growth of Python can be explained by the expansion of data science. Since R is primarily used for statistical analysis, it’s likely that R is part of the same trend. In this post, we’ll analyze how quickly R has grown, examine how its growth differs across industries, and look at what R packages are popular and growing within the ecosystem.
Like Python, a disproportionate amount of traffic to R questions comes from high-income countries (it’s visited about three times as often in those countries as in the rest of the world), so this post will consider Stack Overflow traffic from high-income countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and France. As a disclaimer, we’ll note that the Data Team at Stack Overflow works primarily in R (in fact, we use it to generate almost all of the graphs and results for Insights posts like this one).
Our previous post about Python’s growth considered visits to Python compared to five other major programming languages (Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, and C++) that each make up a substantial share of Stack Overflow question visits. R makes up a smaller share than those tags, so we’ll compare its growth to languages of a similar size.
There is no sense in which R is “competing” with any of these other languages, which aren’t typically used for data analysis. This comparison is shown only to demonstrate that the kind of sustained growth R has shown is rare among languages of comparable size.
Traffic to C questions shows a strong seasonal pattern (since it’s one of the most common choices for undergraduate programming classes), and R has roughly caught up with that level of traffic. Visits to Swift questions grew rapidly after Apple introduced the language in 2014, but have since leveled off. Typescript, though it’s still a smaller source of traffic, has been showing quite remarkable growth, and will be the subject of some future analyses. As we saw in a previous post, traffic to Ruby and especially to Objective C have been declining over time.
Projecting future growth of Stack Overflow visits can be tricky, but according to an STL model it’s reasonable to predict that R will be the seventh most visited programming language tag from high-income countries in 2018, after Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, and C++.
What industries visit R questions the most? (This analysis is restricted to the United States and United Kingdom, the countries in which we can segment our traffic by industry).
R is most visited from universities, where it’s a common choice for academic research, especially in the social sciences and biology. Indeed, in June-July 2017, when most classes aren’t in session, R was the second-most visited tag from universities, second only to Python.
The industry with the second-highest share of R visitors, by a close margin, is healthcare. That probably won’t come as a surprise to biostatisticians, since R is the tool of choice for many statistical methods necessary for clinical studies and bioinformatics.
One industry that doesn’t visit a lot of R, relative to other technologies, is tech: software and web companies. (The Data Team here at Stack Overflow is one exception!) This is partly because data analysis makes up a relatively small portion of the industry’s Stack Overflow visits, compared to software and web development. We separately found that pandas, a data science framework for Python, was less visited in tech than it was in almost all other industries.
