Statistical software
I’ve recently become a convert to Stata for data analysis tasks, and it seems to be an excellent piece of software. One thing that interests me about statistical software in general is the proliferation of different programs. Aside from Stata, there’s SAS, SPSS, R and Eviews, to name a few. Unlike operating systems or wordprocessors for example, there’s no one dominant standard, and each has its own quite loyal and sizeable user base. I guess data file sharing is less common among users of this software compared to wordprocessors, but there still are some network benefits associated with support that you can get from other users of the same software. So it’s interesting that so many varieties can persist in this market but seemingly not in other software markets.
3 Comments
I would say that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the success and dissemination of a statistical software and its flexibility. The power of Stata remains in its capability to adopt other’s programming and some level of user friendship. E-views and SPSS are user friendly but inflexible. R is flexible but not friendly. SAS is none. Stata can be used by professional economist as well as a consultant. The others remain in its own niche.
I have recently been acquainted with Stata too as I have been more familiar with SPSS. In spite of its being a very useful tool, my view is that the programming required to use Stata at an intermediate level does not compare as well with SPSS. I would appreciate an answer about why the previous post says that SPSs is less flexible.
Re: file compatability — R, at least, reads .txt and .csv files (and .xls?), as does MATLAB.