I have seen a few threads talking about why Gretl is not as popular as R. Yes, R has wider
eco-system and more packages. However, Gretl surely has its own advantages in terms of
point and click interface and easy to start with. And I really love its speed and neat
output. Its R integration is really working fast and smooth. After having worked with so
many point and click softwares like SPSS, Stata, smartpls, pspp, matlab....and programming
languages mainly R and Python, I would like to share my thoughts.
Gretl is great for time series and Gretl development should focus on making it first hand
choice. Today when I try to replicate a book like Fpp3, still I am struggling with Naive
forecasting and winters with inconsistent results. We also know that why python is
considered great for machine learning because of consistent boilerplate code. Only the
algorithm name changes, but all other steps remain the same. Split data into train and
test, fit the model etc.
However, in case of Gretl, some times I need to add observations and some times the
software gives option how many out of sample horizon you need. A user prefers, for any
forecasting or smoothing method, the point and click should ask, how many in sample
forecasts you need, and how many out-of-sample forecasts you need to predic. For train
and test data it should provide common metrics, mape, rmse, mad etc. For each forecast it
should be the way.
We don't have to be best in all types of data. For example, for experimental design,
jamovi or spss are the best and it is enough to do any sort of analysis that is
publication ready. And, some packages like vijplots are based on famous ggplot2 and they
are excellent. Jtransform is based on dplyr and I can do many thing without coding in
jamovi now for data manipulation.
We cannot expect, that these changes happen very soon, but over a period of time this
consistent philosophy makes gretl the first choice for time series or any other analysis.
Imagine the joy of a user who will replicate a book (Fpp3) based on a programming language
but can do everything using point and click. It is great for teachers also to teach some
thing first time to the students using gretl.
These are just my thoughts and no offence in any way.