I found Wilkinson's article interesting and am reading the commentary now.
For me Stata is a great environment in which to do most statistical analysis. I use SAS, R, Matlab, Mplus, MX, winBUGS, etc., for various tasks (and am forced to use SPSS from time to time), but Stata is a nice "home base" to do most analyses one would want, and it does a bang up job on a lot of models that people I consult for/collaborate with want, e.g., mixed categorical data models. (My own personal research tends to involve rather more proofs and derivation than data analysis.)
Of course this is all preaching to the choir....
-----Original Message-----
From: "David Airey" <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: 1/22/2009 9:24 PM
Subject: Re: st: The Future of Statistical Computing
On Jan 22, 2009, at 12:54 PM, Stas Kolenikov wrote:
> "Stata was originally the product of Bill Gould and a small group of
> economists from UCLA. It has grown to be a full-featured analytic
> company. The distinctive appeal of the package is its expressive and
> concise programming language, based on C. Stata's unusual strengths
> are in discrete variable modeling, longitudinal/panel designs,
> survival analysis, time series analysis, and survey statistics.
>
> Like S?PLUS, Stata will have to deal with the growth of R in its own
> field?programmable statistics and data analysis. Unlike S?PLUS,
> however, Stata's peculiar strengths and language are different enough
> from R to make it a viable alternative, particularly for
> economists.Moreover, the Stata user community is intensely loyal, so
> we should expect Stata to continue to grow at a respectable rate."
I like Stata like I like my Mac. StataCorp doesn't try to do
everything, but they do try to do things really well, and their is a
simplicity in Stata syntax that in reminiscent of Apple's drive to
simplify. And their service is on par with that provided by Apple for
their products. And yes, StataCorp probably prefers Linux boxes over
OS X, but that's OK. The loyalty is won and maintained, not a fanboy
characteristic.
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
