Re: [Gretl-devel] Signalling

On Mon, 7 Jan 2013, Talha Yalta 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 key question here is "popular among who"? Popularity _per_se_ is not something I personally care very much about. In my view, people who feel ok doing statistics on Excel may very well keep doing so: even if they adopted a modified version of gretl in which they could use their beloved decimal comma, the project, in my not so humble opinion, would gain little benefit, if any at all. The reason why I would like gretl to be more widespread is because I would like to have a larger pool of people who can give valuable contributions to the project in terms of features. And the reason I feel this way is not because I want to brag about the advanced stuff. It's because of what I think the project's end goal should be. As far as I'm concerned, the end goal is to provide a stats/econometrics package which is (1) free; (2) advanced enough so that every conceivable piece of applied economic research can be done by using it (at least in principle); (3) friendly enough to be used in the widest possible range of teaching situations. Please note: (3) would not be possible without (2): the emphasis on math/stat functionality is a necessary condition to make your package useable in teaching (past the undergraduate level). The converse doesn't work. This is a good point to start the discussion from!

A million users whose command of statistics and programming is near-zero (and who, reasonably, find it odd that you can use the comma in excel but not in gretl) are less important, to the reaching of the end goal, than a dozen users who can find bugs and write meaningful bug reports, who follow the recent trends in applied literature and ask the developers "could we add this estimator/test/whatever?" or, better still, do it themselves and upload a function package. The situation has improved over the years, but the pool of contributors we have as of today is very small compared to, say, the R project or even vintage stuff like RATS or TSP (yes, I'm deliberately omitting Stata).

Sure, numbers are important, but then: can you provide any example of a stat package which is *frendlier* than gretl is as of now?

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