Re: [Gretl-users] May I be bold? Meta-suggestions
On Fri, 2 May 2014, Tim Nall wrote:
All,
Again please refer to previous disclaimers about the fact that I
certainly and truly have no idea what I am talking about w. respect to
statistics, and perhaps with respect to other issues as well.
In an earlier post, someone or other expressed a concern that gretl
might be perceived as a toy program that is purely for educational
purposes, and not for serious research. I have no idea whether or not
that's the case, but I would suggest that focusing on pushing gretl as
a serious tool is not the only path toward your ultimate goal. Me
personally, I would recast a perceived shortcoming as a serious
strength: push it as an educational tool. The way to do so, as I
mentioned earlier, is by writing a book.
Heh. I'm not quite sure myself of what my ultimate goals are ;)
But allow me to explain (briefly) why I don't quite agree.
First: there already several books out there that use gretl as a vehicle
for teaching basic econometrics. One is the OUP book by C. Dougherty, but
the most popular resource on the web is arguably Lee Adkins' excellent
companion to "Principles of Econometrics" (which I guess has been
downloaded a gazillion times by a gazillion undergraduate students).
More in general: I'm not particularly interested in world domination. My
goal, as a member of the gretl community, is primarily in providing the
economic scientific community with a nice free (as in speech) tool for
doing econometrics in the best way possible. Of course, "doing"
econometrics means teaching it, but also using econometrics as an
intermediate tool for applied economics (maybe for research, maybe for
other purposes) and even developing new statistical techniques. So, what
I'd like gretl to do is to fulfill the needs of the widest possible
spectrum of users, from the undergraduate student who struggles with OLS
to the theory geek who needs to run a comprehensive Monte Carlo experiment
to assess the finite-sample properties of tests for nonlinear
cointegration in VARFIMA system with alpha-stable, infinite variance
disturbances (the example is totally made up, but doesn't it sound cool?).
You'll agree with me that it's not humanly possible for a small team of
volunteers to achieve all this, for a multitude of reasons. So, we need to
expand the pool of contributors to the project as much as possible. But
knowledge of C is, understandably, rather rare in the profession; and
besides, even if you can code very well in C, finding you way through the
source code of gretl is no mean feat, given the dimension the program has
taken over the years.
So, if we want the project to have a future at all, we need to push hansl
as much as possible to attract new people into the development and to make
it possible to them to transfer their econometric skills into code easily
and efficiently. This is why we are, nowadays, working primarily on hansl:
to ensure gretl has a future.
And besides, because it's fun!
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Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
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