Monday, April 21, 2014

RStata: Funny or just annoying?

Okay okay.  The joke is up.  Besides likely necessitating an emergency call to from the Stata Management Team to the Stata Legal Team, my post on April 1st of 2014 entitled "RStata: Stata Fully Mapped into R", was intended as a practical joke.


Yet, perhaps as a joke on me, the post has become one of my most popular posts of all time with over 450 facebook likes on R bloggers and more than 60 tweets.  The popularity of the post has left me wondering how many people have shared it due to what it claims to do or rather because it is a joke.  In addition, an angry comment and several desperate emails by readers have made me somewhat regretful of the post.

I an attempt to make things better, I have begun a "Stata - R Dictionary" in which 50+ common commands are "translated" between Stata and R including descriptions.  The "dictionary" is a simple github markdown wiki page which should be editable by anybody.

I believe there is some benefit of being able to create such a catalog of commands so that users who have experience in one system can easily look up how to do the same command in the other system.  My hope is that others who are also experienced in using both R and Stata will feel inclined to add to what I have started.

You can find the Dictionary on Github.

10 comments:

  1. You are a good man Francis :)

    Cheers,
    Tal

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  2. Yeah, well, a quick skim of literallyunbelievable.org will show you that, no matter how obvious a parody seems to us, there are plenty of people out there who will go ballistic :-(

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    1. Challenging the doctrine that if the internet says it, it must be true.

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  3. There are some useful "translations" also in:
    http://www.econometricsbysimulation.com/2014/04/rstata-funny-or-just-annoying.html

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    1. This comment is a little confusing :D Must have been meant for something else.

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  4. If your April Fool's Day joke *doesn't* produce some anger/desperation, then it's not a very good April Fool's Day joke.

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  5. I've also got a lot of mileage out of this from Oscar Torres-Reyna at Princeton http://www.princeton.edu/~otorres/RStata.pdf . Not so much a direct command mapping but still very useful. Good luck with the dictionary, I'm sure I will use it.

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  6. I was fooled... and curious about the Trick that allowed you to implement a totally different syntax in R. - but didn't have time to figure out and forgot it until now.:) It is a major relief to learn that the reason I had never heard about this Trick is that there is no such Trick. Thanks :)

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  7. Dude, you're a genius. It's hilarious. I salute you

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  8. There is a real package called RStata for calling Stata from R. It is available at https://github.com/lbraglia/RStata and I have found it to be quite useful.

    From time to time I want to look at it, but Google always gives links to your joke package instead. So I am putting a link to the useful package in this comment. It might be helpful if you could put a link to it in the READ ME file at https://github.com/EconometricsBySimulation/RStata as well.

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