Re: st: The Future of Statistical Computing

[David Airey <david.airey@vanderbilt.edu>]

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.

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