Intro chapter

[bob-carpenter]

Submission Checklist

• Builds locally
• New functions marked with <<{ since VERSION }>>
• Declare copyright holder and open-source license: see below

Summary

This is adding two introductory chapters, "The Stan Ecosystem" and "How Stan Works".

The first chapter summarizes the projects and how they fit together. There's a diagram of GitHub repos and dependencies for the core modules. The second chapter summarizes the reference manual with a couple short examples.

Copyright and Licensing

Please list the copyright holder for the work you are submitting (this will be you or your assignee, such as a university or company):

Simons Foundation

By submitting this pull request, the copyright holder is agreeing to license the submitted work under the following licenses:

• Code: BSD 3-clause (https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)
• Documentation: CC BY-ND 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/)

[WardBrian]

This looks good overall, thanks. Most of my comments are suggestions for places for more cross linking to other doc, which I think never hurts

[WardBrian]

Not sure how stan-ecosystem.png was created, but note that Quarto supports both Mermaid and Graphviz natively: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/diagrams.html

The former would even let the nodes be clickable

[bob-carpenter]

tikz. I didn't want to include the LaTeX source as I'm not sure mathjax could handle something like that.

[WardBrian]

I think it would be nice to include the source as a comment then, in case someone wants to edit/regenerate. Alternatively I bet Claude would one shot converting to Mermaid

[bob-carpenter]

@WardBrian: This is ready to review again. I think I covered all your requests---I left the ones unresolved that were more judgement calls.

[WardBrian]

@bob-carpenter thanks, it all looks good to me. I think it would be slightly better if the flow chart lived in the source somehow (either just as commented tikz or by using the quarto mermaid/graphviz support), but I don't consider that a blocker

[bob-carpenter]

Thanks. I added the source as a comment. We can always change the tech used to generate the plot later.