Nick Cox is the incarnation of Stata. His view on table-machines, when asked to make more user friendly Stata tables:
http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/2010-11/msg00071.html
I think that is a good summary of a widely held view. I have no axe to grind here as I am not a provider in the main territory that Thomas has in mind, but on behalf of fellow user-programmers I suggest that the descriptor "ad hoc" does not quite fit the situation.
Of the programs implied here, and that I know about, I'd say that they all have a clear vision of what they want to do which has been maintained throughout their development. It can seem ad hoc if you want to do something else, but that is a different matter. As I've already remarked in this thread, user-programmers tend to write programs for themselves, with no guarantee of meeting anyone else's needs.
The overall problem here is describable in two words "better tables" and lots of users want to second that. But some want more unified syntax for tables within Stata, some want more detailed control, some want greater support for export to their own favourite foreign programs, standard or otherwise, and some want two or three of those. All understandable enough, but don't complain if this all turns into a [T] manual several hundred pages long to meet not only your reasonable requests, but most other people's too!
Emphasis here varies depending on where you come from. Some people seem routinely to be producing tens or hundreds of tables in rigid formats full of coefficients, standard errors and P-values and those awful stars. Do people actually read them too?
Nick
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
P.S. On a key question of intellectual priority, I lay claim to "Some Alternative Software", as indeed could anyone else who came up with it earlier or later. But (with thanks to Maarten for the compliment) the joke about there being so many standards to choose from is certainly not mine. Andrew Tanenbaum got there much earlier.
