These questions were presented to the respondents who selected R as one of the languages they had used in the last 12 months. An important factor to keep in mind is that our survey targeted developers, while a lot of R users don’t identify themselves as such. Only 16% of R users listed R among their primary languages, while most R users (64%) identify Python as their primary language. Additionally, about half of the users of R in our research are students.
R
Many of the respondents did not know the version of R they use. Additionally, R users do not seem to be loyal to a particular older version, tending instead to promptly adopt new versions of R language.
The popularity of the data.table and plotly R packages has decreased. Meanwhile, there has been an increase in the proportion of respondents who do not use any packages regularly.
Less than half of R users use projects in an IDE to organize their code.
Almost all R users execute their code on their local machines.
Half of R users don’t use any debugging tools.
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and SQLite are the most popular databases among R users, while the share of Redis is relatively small.
The reign of RStudio remains unchallenged.
For years, RStudio has been the most popular IDE for R. Things can change quickly, however. Would you like to try PyCharm with the R plugin? It comes completely free with PyCharm Community Edition.
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