Interesting and stimulating. As with all generalizations, the opinions
of outsiders differ from the view within. I've never seen Stata as
dominated by economists. The argument ALWAYS thrown at me in favour of
R is that it's FREE - apart from your time to search out the best
packages, check incompatibilities, run tests, etc.
I'm amused by Fig 6. "SAS is sui generis" - but only dominates the axis
of size!
I was disappointed by the discussion of data quality. "Data are given."
Brief discussion of data structures and outlier detection, but nothing
on *quality assurance* to try to reduce errors introduced when data are
captured. Most of the interesting data is not captured automatically
("remote and local sensor data"). Current letters in the press about
the quality of transcription of the UK 1911 census online illustrate
that it's very often the case that error rates are higher in large
volumes of data, because the cost of data entry has been squeezed. We
may end up doing ever more computing on ever lousier data, curiously
echoing the tendency of software to grow and bloat so as to negate any
increase in hardware speed as seen by the end user.
Allan
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