Why Stata, not STATA or others?

[River Huang]

Dear All, I read the "Advice on posting to Statalist", which points that the correct spelling is “Stata”, please, not “STATA” in 18 (What was that comment on Stata, not STATA, about?). Can anybody explain why this is the case? Thanks.

[Nick Cox]

It's a copyrighted proprietary name. The company behind the product, now StataCorp LLC, uses the name Stata everywhere (*) in its documentation.

Many program names started out as abbreviations, say in the 1950s and 1960s. SAS and SPSS and BASIC are examples that remain alive in some sense. Also, many software names originated before it was easy to use computers to show lower case (as I recall that did not become widely easy until about 1980).. So, FORTRAN is a contraction of FORmula TRANslation. MATLAB is a contraction of MATrix LABoratory and still the proprietary name used by its parent company, although people often write Matlab and my guess would be that if the program were being issued now, that would be the name.

You might as well ask why do people write STATA at all? That's the real puzzle.

1. Ignorance, although that names the problem, and does not explain it. After all, many people believe lots of incorrect things despite logic and evidence.

2. Copying someone else who is ignorant.

3. Perhaps by analogy: people hear and read about SAS, SPSS, etc. and assume that Stata should be similarly spelled.

(*) 4. The logo which looks like STaTa is perhaps confusing.

(*) 5. Very early documentation (circa 1985) did use the all caps form.

6. You tell me....

NB: The opposite puzzle is why people write excel when the proprietary name is Excel.

[River Huang]

Dear Nick, Many thanks for your detailed explanation.

[Steve Samuels]

It doesn't help that the company logo (top & bottom of this page and elsewhere) is a mixture of upper and lower case letters of the same height,

[Richard Williams]

Stata was originally called STATA. Obviously, anyone who still calls it that is a long-time user who never got used to the change. Or else is still using STATA 1.0.

https://www.stata.com/statalist/arch.../msg00397.html

Alas UCLA used to have photocopies of the STATA 1.0 manuals online, but the links do not work anymore. Hopefully they can be found somewhere. Even in those early manuals you clearly see the foundations for what Stata has become.

[Richard Williams]

The Wayback Machine gives links like this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111125...1/elements.pdf

[Clyde Schechter]

Richard Williams

Thanks for posting that link. That is so cool! (I guess if I were younger I would say it is awesome!)

While I'm here, I'll take a minute to plug the book Thirty Years with Stata: A Retrospective, by Enrique Pinzon, which chronicles the birth and development of Stata and includes entertaining interviews and interesting little facts about many of the people who were involved. It's a quick and enjoyable, completely non-technical, read. Available from the StataCorp bookstore.