No doubt those that read my blog know that the tools I use to do my Industrial Engineering and Operations Research work heavily rely on the open source side of software.  That is why I try to support as many open source projects such as COIN-OR, GLPK, and OpenOpt.  One tool that I love to perform Applied Math and Statistics is the statistical computing platform R.  So it comes as no surprise that I like to see how R is growing and its popularity among programmers.

A recent blog from RedMonk produced results of a programming language popularity study.  The study involved ranking popularity using common social media online sites such as Stack Overflow and GitHub.  These sites draw in a lot of programmers for their popularity around Q&A and code review.  I was surprised to see that R ranks highly compared to some very prominant programming languages.


Also interesting to note that the only other “Data Science” type of programming language I could find was Matlab.  As far as I could tell SAS, S, SPSS, Stata are still rather popular but apparently not among the programming community.