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.
As noted in other replies, this isn’t the Stata homepage, but rather an academic page about the use of the program. Apologies for the confusion, I chose it because it has images that neatly match what Silver shows.
> 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 is either of those two