Attaullah: Thanks for this reply I and no doubt Robert too agree with you warmly about intent. Programmers are all happy to write programs that make life easier for others are well as themselves.
But the thread as pitched by you is not about convenience at all. In choosing the thread title and announcing your new version and presenting examples with timings you claimed, unequivocally, speed advantages of your program over others. which in practice so far just means rangestat . But our replies show that this claim is wrong in some cases and needs severe qualification in others. In making such claims you lay yourself open to discussion and specifically to correction if you are wrong. Also, in comparison fair is fair. just as your program is aimed at a narrow class of problems and ignores others, our program is cast much more generally, and so sometimes efficiency does require combination with other commands. There is nothing unusual or out of order with that kind of advice. The main question is not whether users can think of solutions for themselves. It is whether they can apply such solutions once they have been pointed out. The majority of threads on Statalist fall under this heading.
It's fine to have one large group of users (people in finance) in mind. But there is nothing peculiar about my example as far as another large group of users is concerned. Patients do not all visit clinics every possible day! Also, I did not mention it, but a large class of environmental datasets have similar features. Storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides and many other hazards occur intermittently. Political scientists often deal with data on terrorism incidents, changes of regime, etc., etc. that are irregularly spaced. There is nothing pathological about such data and they are the stuff many people here work with day by day.
As I write your help file still has this unqualified claim
asrol uses efficient codings in the Mata language which makes this version
extremely fast as compared to other available programs. The speed efficiency
matters more in large data sets. This version also overcomes limitation of the
earlier version of asrol which could calculate statistics in a rolling window of
104. asrol can accoomodate any length of the rolling window.
and I've already suggested that such wording needs modification. While I am looking at that paragraph I guess you mean something like a window of at most 104 and that you will want to fix the spelling to "accommodate".
But the thread as pitched by you is not about convenience at all. In choosing the thread title and announcing your new version and presenting examples with timings you claimed, unequivocally, speed advantages of your program over others. which in practice so far just means rangestat . But our replies show that this claim is wrong in some cases and needs severe qualification in others. In making such claims you lay yourself open to discussion and specifically to correction if you are wrong. Also, in comparison fair is fair. just as your program is aimed at a narrow class of problems and ignores others, our program is cast much more generally, and so sometimes efficiency does require combination with other commands. There is nothing unusual or out of order with that kind of advice. The main question is not whether users can think of solutions for themselves. It is whether they can apply such solutions once they have been pointed out. The majority of threads on Statalist fall under this heading.
It's fine to have one large group of users (people in finance) in mind. But there is nothing peculiar about my example as far as another large group of users is concerned. Patients do not all visit clinics every possible day! Also, I did not mention it, but a large class of environmental datasets have similar features. Storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides and many other hazards occur intermittently. Political scientists often deal with data on terrorism incidents, changes of regime, etc., etc. that are irregularly spaced. There is nothing pathological about such data and they are the stuff many people here work with day by day.
As I write your help file still has this unqualified claim
asrol uses efficient codings in the Mata language which makes this version
extremely fast as compared to other available programs. The speed efficiency
matters more in large data sets. This version also overcomes limitation of the
earlier version of asrol which could calculate statistics in a rolling window of
104. asrol can accoomodate any length of the rolling window.
and I've already suggested that such wording needs modification. While I am looking at that paragraph I guess you mean something like a window of at most 104 and that you will want to fix the spelling to "accommodate".
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