Are There Too Many R Packages?

Authors

  • Kurt Hornik Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17713/ajs.v41i1.188

Abstract

The number of R extension packages available from the CRAN repository has tremendously grown over the past 10 years. We look at this phenomenon in more detail, and discuss some of its consequences. In particular, we argue that the statistical computing community needs a more common understanding of software quality, and better domain-specific semantic resources.

References

Daniel Adler and Duncan Murdoch. rgl: 3D visualization device system (OpenGL), 2011. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=rgl. R package version 0.92.798.

Alan Genz, Frank Bretz, Tetsuhisa Miwa, Xuefei Mi, Friedrich Leisch, Fabian Scheipl, and Torsten Hothorn. mvtnorm: Multivariate Normal and t Distributions, 2011. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=mvtnorm. R package version 0.9-9991.

Kurt Hornik. The R FAQ, 2011. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html. ISBN 3-900051-08-9.

Kurt Hornik and Friedrich Leisch. Vienna and R: Love, marriage and the future. In Rudolf Dutter, editor, Festschrift 50 Jahre Österreichische Statistische Gesellschaft, pages 61–70. Österreichische Statistische Gesellschaft, 2002. ISSN 1026-597X.

Kurt Hornik and Duncan Murdoch. Watch your spelling! R Journal, 2011. To appear.

Edzer J. Pebesma and Roger S. Bivand. Classes and methods for spatial data in R. R News, 5(2):9–13, November 2005. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/Rnews/.

Martyn Plummer, Nicky Best, Kate Cowles, and Karen Vines. CODA: Convergence diagnosis and output analysis for MCMC. R News, 6(1):7–11, 2006. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/Rnews/.

Wikipedia. Debian — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2011a. URL http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Debian&oldid=461095814. [Online; accessed 17-November-2011].

Wikipedia. Arxiv — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2011b. URL http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ArXiv&oldid=460023627. [Online; accessed 18-November-2011].

Wikipedia. Ontology (information science) — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2011c. URL http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ontology (information science)&oldid=459398883. [Online; accessed 18-November-2011].

Achim Zeileis. CRAN task views. R News, 5(1):39–40, 2005. URL http://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/Rnews/.

Downloads

Published

2016-02-24

How to Cite

Hornik, K. (2016). Are There Too Many R Packages?. Austrian Journal of Statistics, 41(1), 59–66. https://doi.org/10.17713/ajs.v41i1.188

Issue

Section

Articles