On Mon, 2 Jan 2006, Philippe Grosjean wrote: > > That said, I think one should interpret Mitchell's paper in a different > way. Obviously, he is an unconditional and happy Stata user (he even > wrote a book about graphs programming in Stata). His claim in favor of > Stata (versus SAS and SPSS, and also, indirectly, versus R) is to be > interpreted the same way as unconditional lovers of Macintoshes or PCs > would argue against the other clan. Both architectures are good and have > strengths and weaknesses. Real arguments are more sentimental, and could > resume in: "The more I use it, the more I like it,... and the aliens are > bad, ugly and stupid!" Would this apply to Stata versus R? I don't know > Stata at all, but I imagine it could be the case from what I read in > Mitchell's paper...
I think there are good reasons why Stata is becoming much more popular in epidemiology and biostatistics [and I'm not particularly prejudiced against R]. In my experience people who like R also like Stata, though clearly the reverse is not necessarily true. Stata, like R, is readily programmable. Users can -- and do -- write and distribute programs that look just like the built-in routines. There is an active and helpful mailing list. However, Stata programming is very different from R programming, since it is macro-based (think Tcl/Tk) rather than function-based. Stata is also easier to learn: it has a very consistent syntax and even better documentation than R. We use Stata for all our service course teaching, and despite the fact that it is command-line based rather than GUI the students were no more unhappy than when SPSS was used for the lowest-level courses and Egret for the higher-level service courses. [Stata now has a GUI but it is awful and quite a lot of students prefer the command-line] -thomas ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html