Where does Stata fit into all of this, and why is it never discussed on HN?
The SAS vs. R Debate
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#12My favorite part about the SAS v R debate was the conclusion of this article:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/sas-warms-to-open-s...
"""In the article, Ms. Milley said, “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code. We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”
To her credit, Ms. Milley addressed some of the critical comments head-on in a subsequent blog post."""
(Boeing uses R heavily and when you fly on their aircraft, you're flying on open source)
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#13These people:
produce a compiler, tools etc that run the language of SAS.
(disclaimer: I interviewed there last year)
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#14Where does Stata fit into all of this, and why is it never discussed on HN?
Stata is great as an excel replacement and has a decent library of pre-programmed statistical models. It's GUI based and targets applied researchers in economics etc. Unfortunately, extending any functions and defining your own models is quite a hassle unless you're familiar with mata (quirky matlab-esque syntax) and R's ecosystem is much more cutting edge.
Stata is great for drag and drop data manipulation from what I remember, an excellent excel replacement. Nothing beats dragging and dropping in variables and typing: reg y x1 x2 for immediate regression results.
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#15Is this even a discussion? Anyone serious about analyzing data will use either R, Python (with Pandas/SciPy, etc), or Julia. For truly immense data sets that require pipelines, you'll use tools like spark, hadoop, etc - but SAS is basically a slightly improved excel.
> SAS is basically a slightly improved excel. SAS is a pretty big system, and I have worked with SAS for about 10 years, and I can't see any similarity with Excel at all. Which part of the SAS system do you think resembles Excel ? Here is a list of their products ( http://support.sas.com/documentation/productaz/index.html ) Btw. I do think I am doing serious data analysis in a bank :-)
He might have only seen Enterprise Guide, which indeed resembles Excel. But that a good thing, actually.
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#16Where does Stata fit into all of this, and why is it never discussed on HN?
Stata is seen as a less powerful, more usable version and cheaper version of SAS; it's also comes off as less flexible than R when it comes to more complex queries. Companies with large teams can afford what statistician would see as a better tool; R is seen as the favored tool for the lone analyst with extensive background, or the hard-science academic. Stata on the other hand is mainly favored by social science practicionners and some more statistics-inclined marketing people, neither dwell Hacker News too much.
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#17I used to work for one of the largest U.S insurance companies. They were always behind in transitioning to new technology (Excel 2003 could be found there in 2013). That being said, the entire staistical modeling team and research department made the switch to R and Python. Only a few clung to SAS but realized they would be forced to move to R as any collabration would need to be converted to R and not to SAS.
I believe it will be R verus Python future and SAS will not be a part of it.
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#18The article says this particular instance of the debate started in 2011. Things have shifted a little since then, and I think Python has won more mindshare with Pandas, SciPy, NumPy, and all the rest. I've used both Python and R, and think the next debate will be between those two, as people find that R is not a very good programming language and lacks decent libraries for things like web scraping. Python can be a si…
> R right now still wins in the number of algorithms implemented in it
Can you please list some important tools implemented in R but not in Python? I'd like to know how bit the gap is.
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#19Questions on StackOverflow: 49 878 R, 2 191 SAS; on Stats StackExchange: 5 524 R, 260 SAS.
Re: The SAS vs. R Debate
#20The article says this particular instance of the debate started in 2011. Things have shifted a little since then, and I think Python has won more mindshare with Pandas, SciPy, NumPy, and all the rest. I've used both Python and R, and think the next debate will be between those two, as people find that R is not a very good programming language and lacks decent libraries for things like web scraping. Python can be a si…
> R right now still wins in the number of algorithms implemented in it Can you please list some important tools implemented in R but not in Python? I'd like to know how bit the gap is.
Is there an equivalent Python package to R's {stats}?
http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/00...