Nick Cox WROTE:
>The absence of a dialog means no more than that. Neither SSC nor SJ
insist on dialogs in submissions: if either did, the number of
submissions would fall drastically. <
No doubt about it. I've written a GUI. Even with modern software
development tools it's not easy.
>In Stataland, "official" has a bespoke sense of whatever software or
documentation or opinions or mugs or T-shirts emanate from StataCorp. <
Precisely. I'm getting in the mind of a fearful user. These people are
paranoid of "user contributions" and they really like point and click.
Software like R is attractive because of the price, but the blizzard of
user contributions without a corporation standing behind them puts many
off (as does the general difficulty of getting data into R).
Stata is actually a really good choice for them because it's got lots of
what they need and more and is set up in the way they understand; most
crucially it has a great GUI. They'll come around eventually but
"official" and dialog boxes are very helpful sales entry points.
-adjust-, being a very powerful way to generate output from many models,
strikes me as a potential "killer app." *We* all know it's a wrapper for
-pred- but the guts of Stata are too much for the start.
I like Stata and will buy it no matter what happens, and therefore my
students will use it in class. I'm just throwing out some feedback on
what I think would make Stata really attractive to users, many of whom
are POed right now by SPSS' arbitrary and expensive licensing.
JV
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