I see in the news that later this year Microsoft will make their "WSL" for installing GNU/Linux applications on Windows work with GUI applications. Maybe, if we wait, we can just use that without building anything special.
On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 1:31 PM Michel Boaventura <mic...@boaventura.dev> wrote: > > On 21/05/16 09:44PM, John Darrington wrote: > > On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 11:00:44AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote: > > > > Yes, I agree. Classic SPSS isn't general purpose enough to write > > statistical procedures > > that are as easy to use as the ones built into it. The SPSS language > > manages to > > be a misery of inconsistencies that make it near impossible to > > generalize. > > The macro language (which I'm currently implementing), which appears > > to be > > meant for extensions, is terrible. > > > > Maybe we will eventually be able to implement the Python extensions to > > SPSS. > > Those are the most fruitful direction I've seen toward making SPSS > > programmable > > in a reasonably friendly way. > > > > Some years ago I wrote an experimental scheme interface which seemed to > > work quite well. > > Perhaps I'll dig it up again some time. The biggest complication as I > > remember was > > dealing with missing values. They always complicate matters in unexpected > > ways. > > > > J' > > > > I've been working with students from Social Sciences, Pedagogy and Statistics > for about 15 years and it seems > to me that students with a more technical background usually use R or even > Python. For me, PSPP and SPSS meant > to be used by people who like to just point, click, run an analysis, build a > report and call it a day. > > Usually when they are talking to me about PSPP the suggestions are usually > related to the output not being > editable and polished like on SPSS, since they are used to edit it on the fly > and generate a report. (For > which I usually advice them to export an ODS and use LibreOffice to do what > they need). > > I think this is very similar to what usually happens with me being a back-end > developer. No matter if the > system is well implemented and robust, users usually judge it by how "shine" > the system looks. > > -- > Michel Boaventura
