by Andrie de Vries
Every once in a while somebody asks me how many packages are on CRAN. (More than 8,000 in April, 2016). A year ago, in April 2015, there were ~6,200 packages on CRAN.
This poses a second question: what is the historical growth of CRAN packages?
One source of information is Bob Muenchen’s blog R Now Contains 150 Times as Many Commands as SAS, that contains this graphic showing packages from 2002 through 2014. (Bob fitted a quadratic curve through the data, that fits quite well, except that this model estimates too high in the very early years).
CRAN package data through 2014 by Bob Muenchen
But where does this data come from? Bob’s article references an earlier article by John Fox in the R Journal, Aspects of the Social Organization and Trajectory of the R Project. (This is a fascinating article, and I highly recommend you read it). The analysis by John Fox contains this graphic showing data from 2001 through 2009. John fits an exponential growth curve through the data, that again fits very well:
CRAN package data through 2009 by John Fox
I was particularly interested in trying to see if I can find the original source of the data. The original graphic contains a caption with references to the R source code on SVN, but I could only find the release dates of historical R releases, not the package counts.
Next I put the search term “john fox 2009 cran package data” into my favourite search engine and came across the dataset CRANPackages in the package Ecdat. The Ecdat package contains data sets for econometrics, compiled by Spencer Graves.
I promptly installed the package and inspected the data:
> library(Ecdat)> head(CRANpackages)
Version Date Packages ...read moreSource:: r-bloggers.com