A conversation with Kit Baum

As explained in the Editorial announcements at the start of this issue, the Stata Journal will be featuring various interviews with selected members of the Stata community in 2010, Stata’s 25th anniversary year. In this issue, we start with an online interview, dated October 14, 2009, of Christopher F. “Kit” Baum, an economics professor at Boston College. Kit has been highly active as a Stata user since the 1990s, contributing as an author and associate editor to this journal and its predecessor, the Stata Technical Bulletin; as a much-downloaded Stata program author; as an author of two notable Stata-based texts; as a frequent participant on Statalist and at Users Group meetings in both the United States and several European countries; and as founder and maintainer for more than a decade of the SSC archive, which now contains many hundred user-written Stata packages. In this interview, he comments on how he got into Stata and adds his own speculations for the future