The R language surged to 8th place in the 2017 TIOBE language rankings, up 8 places from a year before. Fellow data science language language Python also saw an increase in rankings, taking the 4th spot (one ahead of its January 2016 ranking).
(Click the table for the current top 20 rankings.) TIOBE ranks programming languages according to their search engine rankings, and R has been steadily climbing since the rankings began:
You can find the current TIOBE language rankings, updated monthly, at the link below.
TIOBE: TIOBE Index