comparison of statistical packages

Michael Mitchell, UCLA ATS Statistical Consulting Group, provided a comprehensive comparison of SPSS, STATA, and SAS. Check out his report here.

On p.31, he talked about R and thinks that R is very difficult to learn. Well, I agree it is difficult to learn R if there is no right road map and guidence. But, R is not difficult to master if you just want some results. Most of time, R requires only several lines to get the results. Therefore, it is still an open for students to decide what they like. If I like Stata, I would say that a graphical user interface of R (R-GUI), such as JGR will make R look and and easy to use as Stata.