Let's be clearer on the trade-off here.
In the two examples quoted,
pairwise correlation matrix
chi-square tests
it happens that there are user-written
solutions, but you have to
1. Be lucky like that, i.e. something exists.
2. Be very lucky, i.e. that something
does exactly what you want.
3. Find it. Despite aids and experience, this
can be still be tricky.
4. Trust the user-programmer.
5. Be lucky again if you run into problems,
that the user-programmer, or somebody else,
will provide support. (StataCorp won't,
on user-written programs.)
With Mata, you have greater power to do it yourself.
That said, user-programmers are not yet redundant!
Nick
[email protected]
William Gould, Stata
>
> David Airey <[email protected]> asked,
>
> > [...] Will Stata offer Mata courses, and if so, what kind
> of prerequisite
> > knowledge will be required? [...]
>
> Probably. Yes. I'm the one writing it and I keep going back
> and forth
> on whether to make it a course first and then a book, or jump
> directly
> to the book. As you can tell, I'm not as far along as I should be.
< many details >
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