R

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.

Which version of R do you mainly use?

More than 60% of respondents use the latest versions of R. Only 11% reported using versions 3.6 or older of the language, compared to 25% last year. There are a substantial number of respondents who did not know the version of R they use.

Which of the R 4.1 syntax features have you started using in your code?

Over half of the respondents have started using the R 4.1 syntax features. 49% of those who started using shorthand syntax for anonymous functions also started using native pipe operators.

What IDE do you use to code R?

What do you use R for?

The use cases for R remain quite stable year over year. More than half of the respondents use R for data analysis or educational purposes.

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

GGPlot2 is the most popular package to use with R – more than 50% of the respondents use the package. Since data visualization is one of the most important tasks in data science and education, it is not surprising that GGPlot is the most popular package to use with R.

Which form of R code organization do you use?

Where do you execute R code?

The popularity of using virtual machines for executing R code has grown since last year. One in four respondents uses servers for executing R code in 2022. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of users execute R code on their local machines.