Analyst firm RedMonk periodically publishes rankings of the Top 20 programming languages, as measured by activity on StackOverflow and number of repositories on GitHub. In their most recent ranking (January 2014), R is ranked #15 amongst all programming languages. An impressive ranking for a domain-specific language; the top 3 were the general-purpose languages Java, Javascript and PHP. Here’s a chart of the raw rankings in both dimensions (and astute readers will notice from the ggplot2 chart that the ranking analysis itself was done in R)
via R is 15th of top programming languages in latest RedMonk ranking | (R news & tutorials).