Re: windows installers

[Ben Pfaff]

I see in the news that later this year Microsoft will make their "WSL"
for installing GNU/Linux applications on Windows work with GUI
applications. Maybe, if we wait, we can just use that without building
anything special.

On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 1:31 PM Michel Boaventura <michel@boaventura.dev> wrote:
>
> On 21/05/16 09:44PM, John Darrington wrote:
> > On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 11:00:44AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> >
> >      Yes, I agree. Classic SPSS isn't general purpose enough to write
> >      statistical procedures
> >      that are as easy to use as the ones built into it. The SPSS language 
> > manages to
> >      be a misery of inconsistencies that make it near impossible to 
> > generalize.
> >      The macro language (which I'm currently implementing), which appears 
> > to be
> >      meant for extensions, is terrible.
> >
> >      Maybe we will eventually be able to implement the Python extensions to 
> > SPSS.
> >      Those are the most fruitful direction I've seen toward making SPSS 
> > programmable
> >      in a reasonably friendly way.
> >
> > Some years ago I wrote an experimental scheme interface which seemed to 
> > work quite well.
> > Perhaps I'll dig it up again some time.  The biggest complication as I 
> > remember was
> > dealing with missing values.  They always complicate matters in unexpected 
> > ways.
> >
> > J'
> >
>
> I've been working with students from Social Sciences, Pedagogy and Statistics 
> for about 15 years and it seems
> to me that students with a more technical background usually use R or even 
> Python. For me, PSPP and SPSS meant
> to be used by people who like to just point, click, run an analysis, build a 
> report and call it a day.
>
> Usually when they are talking to me about PSPP the suggestions are usually 
> related to the output not being
> editable and polished like on SPSS, since they are used to edit it on the fly 
> and generate a report. (For
> which I usually advice them to export an ODS and use LibreOffice to do what 
> they need).
>
> I think this is very similar to what usually happens with me being a back-end 
> developer. No matter if the
> system is well implemented and robust, users usually judge it by how "shine" 
> the system looks.
>
> --
> Michel Boaventura