Today (2012-08-23) on CRAN [1]:
"Currently, the CRAN package repository features 4001 available
packages."
These packages are maintained by approximately 2350 different folks.
Previous milestones:
2011-05-12: 3,000 packages [1]
2009-10-04: 2,000 packages [2]
2007-04-12: 1,000 packages [3]
2004-10-01: 500 packages [4]
2003-04-01: 250 packages [4]
[1] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/
[2] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2009-October/055049.html
[3] https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2007-April/045359.html
[4] My private in-house data.
[5] http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary_by_maintainer.html
/Henrik
PS. This count includes only packages on CRAN. There are more
packages elsewhere.