In an idle moment this afternoon, I wrote a Stata command.

It was to create a light-weight implemention of the “percentogram” described at https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/04/13/the-percentogram-a-histogram-binned-by-percentages-of-the-cumulative-distribution-rather-than-using-fixed-bin-widths/, and I like the result, but it struck me that it is a good example of how practical and useful it can be to engage in Stata programming. Also, it’s a good example of how writing code in Stata (in a programmable command language) is very different from writing code in a stats-capable programming language like R, Python or Julia.