Please Switch to Python. Or R. Or Anything. Just Not Stata, SAS, SPSS, or Matlab

12 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by heterodoxjedi

3 Comments

Alifatisk

4 hours ago

I liked Matlab, I was so used to it. Then I switched job, which meant I could not keep the company license for it. At that point, I realized what proprietary, vendor lock-in meant. The Matlab snippets I had was now unusable to me, until I bought a license myself. I tried GNU Octave, but it felt half-baked.

tim333

3 hours ago

I guess maybe you can say to an LLM "here's a snippet, rewrite in Python"?

heterodoxjedi

3 hours ago

I was able to bring my Stata license with me from graduate school, but I wasn't allowed to install Stata on my work computer. Plus, it was already 5+ years old and I wasn't going to get product updates.