On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 5:24 AM, Talha Yalta
<talhayalta@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
“Let’s not kid ourselves: the most widely used piece of software for
statistics is Excel” –Ripley.
Not only that it is the most popular, but also there are many
textbooks for statistics as well as econometrics with Excel. So this
is a perfectly valid example and we do need to consider what makes
Excel, SPSS, Eviews popular if we are talking about how to make gretl
more popular.
The publisher John Wiley & Sons surveyed the users of Hill et. al. Principles of Econometrics for software choices. As many of you know this is an advanced undergraduate book--though many like me use it for masters level classes (the latter chapters in it are particularly good for this, IMO). The vast majority of the book's users opt for Eviews (43%) followed by Stata and Excel (about 21% each). 11% reported using gretl. SAS, R, and SPSS all report less than 1% each. I think their sample size was around 6000 or so.
My guess is that Excel is popular because the marginal cost of its use is zero for most adopters. Everybody has it already and sort of knows how to use it. Gretl's cost, though not zero, is very low. The biggest difference is that you have to install it and learn something new to use it. Gretl is much easier to use and more purpose specific in all other ways, so it theoretically should have an advantage if product awareness was that of the others. That's my take, anyway..