First off, it seems likely that many people,
particularly those relatively new to Stata, or
those who don't study the Stata literature in detail,
are not aware who Joe Hilbe is. Joe was the first
editor of the Stata Technical Bulletin and directly
or indirectly contributed several key things
to Stata, especially in the first decade or
so. So: he's no ordinary Joe, and has been
a distinguished member of the Stata community
since the beginning, as his piece in SJ 5(1)
attests.
Beyond that, I have no knowledge on
exactly why Joe wants input and what
he is going to do with it. That's for him
to comment on at his convenience.
Naturally, there remain two well-trod ways
of discussing the limitations of Stata:
1. Statalist. One advantage of open
discussion is that you can sometimes learn
that you are wrong: the functionality does
actually exist! Also, a wide consensus on
any point is likely to be more evident
to StataCorp.
2. Tech-support. One advantage of that
is requests do get filed. Of course, your
good idea may be competing with ten
thousand others, but you are going direct
to the people who develop Stata.
The question of where to put stuff has
also been raised, and that's for individual
user-programmers to decide. I can appreciate
why many users prefer to maintain their own
websites.
For my part I want to underline my support for the SSC
archive maintained by Kit Baum. It's an
archive, and not refereed, but there are entry
thresholds and unique filenames within SSC are
guaranteed. Lastly, the existence of the -ssc-
command within official Stata is an attempt to
make use of SSC as reliable and painless as possible.
Nick
[email protected]
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