Bill and Ted Make the best out of a Shi… Stata situation: Rstudio + Rstata + Stata
This article is originally published at https://mikejacktzen.wordpress.com
After rewatching the thanksgiving classic, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, it reminded me of the history of #Rstats and its current status as the defacto software for general data programming.
The most excellent thing about R, is the literate programming options you have. As a data analyst, you are Bill S. Preston Esquire (or Ted “Theodore” Logan, they are exchangeable). Rstudio is the time traveling phone booth. Since its conception, Rstats had Sweave’s phone number on speed dial. Now, Rstudio has Rmarkdown. Compare this situation with… Stata. Stata is Ghenkis Khan.
Seeing Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel post about the joys of Stata,
During these discussions a package called RStata also came up. This package is [a] simple R -> Stata interface allowing the user to execute Stata commands (both inline and from a .do file) from R.” Looks promising as it should allow running Stata commands from an R Markdown chunk. But it’s really not realistic to think students learning Stata for the first time will learn well (and easily) using this R interface. I can’t imagine teaching Stata and saying to students “first download R”. Not that I teach Stata, but those who do confirmed that it would be an odd experience for students…
I decided to see for myself how (un)approachable writing narratives for literate programming in Stata really is.
If Plato pitched his ideal to So-crates, he would claim:
Integrating Rstudio + Rmarkdown + R + RStata, should give you the best of 3 worlds
1) Write narratives that are human-readable
2) Manipulate data with human-readable R code
3) Have ‘paid-for-assurance’ of Stata analysis commands
But! Bill and Ted would probably get bogged down during the setup. The key overhead step is to make sure Bill’s RStata package plays nicely with his local copy of Stata.
This is like chaparoning Ghenkis Khan in a shopping mall by letting him run loose without an adult-sized child leash. He might be enjoying a delicious Cinnabon all by his lonesome, or he might be playing home run derby with a mannequin’s head.
It depends on Ghengis’ mood aka the disgruntled software versions in his computing environment.
The setup overhead is definitely an obstacle against adoption. You need to also version control Rstudio (undergoing rapid development) for its notebook feature and you need to align the Stata version (with their yearly business as usual updates).
I can only see this being useful if Ted is a Stata user with a near ‘final’ Stata .do file that he wants to share in a reproducible manner. During his presentation to his high school history class, Ted would just narrate his analysis center stage via markdown and whenever a result needs to be piped in, he could just chunk-source the .do file in Rstudio (like pulling Ghengis Khan out of the phone booth). Most Excellent.
The gist below is my standalone Rnotebook demo that should work if you have Rstudio 1.0.44 and Stata 14. Your Mileage May Very, with or without a time traveling phone booth.
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This article is originally published at https://mikejacktzen.wordpress.com
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