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

Which version of R do you mainly use?

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.

What do you use R for?

Half of the respondents use R for educational purposes. Even among those who are not students, 42% use R for education.

Which of the following packages do you regularly use with R?

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.

Which form of R code organization do you use?

Less than half of R users use projects in an IDE to organize their code.

Where do you execute R code?

Almost all R users execute their code on their local machines.

What do you use to debug your code?

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.

What IDE do you use to code R?

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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