> What is your background? Academic research, so more econometrics/data science work, but I have some experience with application programming that I've managed

> What is your background? Academic research, so more econometrics/data science work, but I have some experience with application programming that I've managed to leverage. > Most people I know who are either statisticians or scientists first and programmers only reluctantly love Stata and SPSS They are good to the extent that a lot of published - social science - research uses terms and methods that assume you're using one of the two. Of course, having an ok point and click interface also helps. However, data access, aggregation, and cleaning are easily ninety percent of what's involved in even basic econometric(y) research. It is orders of magnitude easier to do all of this programmatically in R. Once you start working with larger datasets, or once performance becomes an issue, you pretty much have to transition to Python, Julia, or something similar by default.