SAS Beats R on July 2012 TIOBE Rankings

The TIOBE Community Programming Index ranks the popularity of programming languages, but from a programming language perspective rather than as analytical software (http://www.tiobe.com). It extracts measurements from blogs, entries in Wikipedia, books on Amazon, search engine results, etc. and combines them into a single index. The July 2012 rankings place SAS in 24th place and R in 28th. This is a reversal from the January rankings, which had R in 24th place and SAS at 31st.

The Transparent Language Popularity Index is very similar to the TIOBE Index except that, as you might guess, its ranking software, algorithm and data are published for all to see. I didn’t find this index until July of 2012 at which time it ranks R in 12th place and SAS in 25th.

I have updated this information in my ongoing article, The Popularity of Data Analysis Software.