Re: [Gretl-devel] Signalling
Gretl has always had and still has the comparative advantage in the
area of easy to use, menu driven software complementary to R etc. As
can be seen from Eviews, SPSS... there is need for such programs and,
unlike programming languages, there are really no good and free
alternatives for such GUI based programs.
Gretl?
Unfortunately, gretl has not been doing well in improving its GUI
facilities. Sure there has been some work, most notably the tabbed
model output. However, there are many many missing features,
inconsistencies, an increasing feel of loss of intuitiveness due to
the lack of a general design direction. It is also looking
increasingly dated and convoluted.
I kind of agree on this point. Even though I can always find what I am
looking for (which is a problem in OxMetrics) I find the GUI a little
unintuitive. Unfortunately a cannot really say what to change in order make
it more intuitive to me. Only, that I don't like the category "Nonlinear
models" as I think the categories should be positively defined (like the
story about the two animals of the world: Elephants and non-elephants). A
more real problem is GTK maybe. It just doesn't look good in general and in
particular not on Windows and Mac. Again, I have no idea about how to
change that as I guess it would take too much work without any
functionality gains.
Moreover, the decision to unsupport
localized input was a big, big, big mistake. If a spreadsheet program
such as Excel, Calc, Gnumeric or Google Spread said they won't support
decimal comma inputs because that is not very useful and/or hard to
do, everyone would laugh. However, gretl decided somehow along the way
that such way would be acceptable for most users. Hah.
This has been discussed before, but I think this criticism is just
mistaken. The support for decimal comma in Gretl is just as good as the
support in Excel. Also, you deliberately changed focus from statistical
packages to spreadsheets. Which statistical scripting languages support
localised inputs?
I have thought about what I think the obstacles for Gretl are in getting
more attention. The statistical functionalities in Gretl are really great.
Within my own area I think that the cointegration stuff is really great and
better than most of the commercial packages (but the unrestricted models
should still go :-)). At my department we teach SAS but faculty uses Stata
and I don't think it will change anytime soon. Maybe people like the idea
about a supporting institution (enterprise) for the software to ensure
continuity which is again a problem that is hard to deal with.
Best
Andreas
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