Instructor in an R workshop: We often need to import data from other statistical software packages. Stata is widely-used across the social sciences. Different packages have different constituencies and market shares across disciplines and industries and over time. Economists use Stata a lot. Sociologists often use it too. Psychologists use SPSS so it’s entrenched there, and in the pharmaceutical industry SAS is kind of well-established there…well, I mean I shouldn’t troll other packages; they’re all very good. We’re using R now, here in the 21st century. If you want to go back to 1995 you can use SPSS, and if you want to go back to 1985 you can use Stata, and if you want to go back to 1955 you can use SAS.