Re: windows installers

[Michel Boaventura]

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

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