Interesting post. For the popularity of programming languages(including statistical packages), TIOBE Programming Community Index would be informative(updated:* *June 2010):

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

In Index(June 2010), SAS is #1 among statistical packages (rank 14/100 among all programming languages. C/C++/Java are in Top 3 ). Others:

Matlab: 18/100

Fortran: 31/100

Maple, Mathematica, R, SPSS: in [#51 to #100] for their differences are > relatively small.

This Index counts the hits of the most popular search engines(Google, MSN, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and YouTube) with the query +"<language> programming".

--------- John(Jiangtang) HU jiangtanghu@gmail.com +86 138-1171-7765 http://www.jiangtanghu.com/

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Muenchen, Robert A (Bob) <muenchen@utk.edu>wrote:

> Hi All, > > I've been fiddling around with various ways to estimate the popularity > of R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, JMP, Minitab, Statistica, Systat, BMDP, S-PLUS, > R-PLUS and Revolution R. It's not an easy task. You can see what I've > come up with so far at http://r4stats.com/popularity . I'm sure people > will have plenty of ideas on how to improve this, so please let me know > what you think. > > Cheers, > Bob > > ========================================================= > Bob Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen), Manager > Research Computing Support > Voice: (865) 974-5230 > Email: muenchen@utk.edu > Web: http://oit.utk.edu/research, > News: http://oit.utk.edu/research/news.php > Feedback: http://oit.utk.edu/feedback/ > ========================================================= >