[Mathias Brandt]

Dear Hemanshu Kumar and Chen Samulsion !
Thank you very much for your clarification! I didn't know how to backtrack my statements! Immensely helpful!
BW
Mathias

[Chen Samulsion]

Will Stata 19 be launched in this month? What features should be expected most?

[Nick Cox]

Those who say do not know. THose who know do not say. I have precisely no inside information on this, and if I had, well, I couldn't tell you any way.

Less gnomically: The long history of new releases is that the President of StataCorp announces a new release and what it contains on Statalist, precisely when the release date is known and certain. Even though the days of DVDs in the mail, not to mention enormous boxes of printed manuals, are long gone, there are always features to be added, bugs to be fixed, and documentation to be revised and checked before a new release.

That long history aside, there will be fewer surprises this release, or so I guess Many features have been added over the last year or so as part of StataNow.

[Chen Samulsion]

Thank you Nick Cox. I agree with you. I think even number version (especially 8, 10, 16, 18) often bring big surprises.

[Richard Williams]

Thank you Nick Cox. I agree with you. I think even number version (especially 8, 10, 16, 18) often bring big surprises.

I hadn’t noticed that even numbered versions of Stata brought bigger surprises. Is that sort of like how the even numbered Star Trek movies are a lot better than the odd numbered ones? ;-)

Even if that is true though, much of what is going to be in Stata 19 is already in Statanow. As the Statanow announcement said,

”When Stata 19 eventually comes out, it will of course include all the features that have come out along the way in StataNow as well as some additional new ones. Users of StataNow will automatically be able to upgrade to Stata 19 -- actually, they will upgrade to StataNow 19.5 when Stata 19.0 comes out, and over time StataNow 19.5 will get additional features as soon as they are ready from the Stata elves.”

For those who have StataNow, it will probably be more like getting little presents throughout the year rather than getting a bunch of presents at Christmas. But you can always hope that it has that one present you’ve really been wanting.