re: st: can anyone compare stata vs splus/R

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

.

> I want to know much about Stata.Anyone can give a general  
> comparison between Stata and Splus/R? I have found some artical one  
> Stata vs. SPSS and SAS ,but can not found any about "Stata vs.  
> Splus/R",especially Stata 9 vs Splus.
Maybe 3-4 years ago I made the choice between Stata 7 and R 1.X. At  
that time, I made the right choice. Documentation of R was very poor  
for the non-statistician. Between Stata 9 and R 2.X, I made the same  
choice. Stata has a wide array of commands, has unsurpassed  
documentation (Stata manuals) and online help (either in the form of  
Stata Net Courses or the UCLA ATS Stata pages), has a more responsive  
listserv for beginner and intermediate questions. R 2.X now has good  
and growing documentation for the non-statistician (books that you  
can buy). I think if you are an MS or PhD statistician with no money,  
R is a fine choice. Of course, if you are an MS/PhD statistician, you  
probably have money & access to many statistical tools, so this is  
not a useful point. I use Stata for most of my stuff and R for those  
times something is in R that is not in Stata that is beyond my  
programming & statistical expertise (some gene microarray tools,  
shape statistics & nonlinear mixed models). I also tend to use both  
when I don't trust something I don't understand and I want to see if  
I've got roughly the same answer going.

-Dave
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