Robert A. Munchen at r4stats.com:
Learning to use a data analysis tool well takes significant effort, so people tend to continue using the tool they learned in college for much of their careers. As a result, the software used by professors and their students is likely to predict what the next generation of analysts will use for years to come. I track this trend, and many others, in my article The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. In the latest update (4/13/2012) I forecast that, if current trends continued, the use of the R software would exceed that of SAS for scholarly applications in 2015. That was based on the data shown in Figure 7a, which I repeat here:
via r4stats.com
I had a discussion over beers about this sort of thing after the SEP meeting on Monday. I have no idea what R is (or MATLAB before that); I thought that I was out of touch because I didn't use Stata! I still use SAS for data management and pretesting and then transfer the data to Limdep/Nlogit for finalizing the models (I teach SPSS for undergraduates in senior seminar ... and the next time I teach business stats, maybe). It is surprising that Limdep/Nlogit isn't even mentioned amongst the 25 or so softwares described in the article. Is it that much of a niche product?
Hat tip: Newmark's Door