Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was looking for a download, but there's precious little about that on the website. The closest I got were these remarks: > On all Reed lab computers, Stata is located in the Applications folder. > Stata can be found in the Applications folder of any school machine. On a PC, it is most likely located in Program Files. Does that imply it's neither open source nor even commercially available? Seems rather odd, surely it…
Stata is fairly ubiquitous in statistical circles, especially those working in econometrics. While I preferred using Stata in academia, it is expensive and R is similar, just not as easy to use.
Agreed. Stata makes common statistical operations easy, and the higher-level licenses are extremely powerful. But I prefer R because it's so much more flexible when trying to perform more complex data manipulations. Plus lots of statistical papers with new techniques include R code.