Re: windows installers

[Ben Pfaff]

On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 9:31 AM John Darrington
<john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 01:23:13PM -0300, Michel Boaventura wrote:
>
>      I think most of Windows' users aren't technical at all. To be honest, I 
> think I've never met a Windows
>      developer in my life. Usually when users have a good technical knowledge 
> they migrate to Linux.
>
> I've been thinking for some time, that one of the biggest failures of PSPP 
> (and
> SPSS) is that it makes an artificial distinction between computer users and
> computer developers.  As a result of this, PSPP has very few developers.
>
> Compare this to (say) R which has many developers;  I think this is because 
> they
> realised long ago, that ALL computer users are programmers and ALL computer
> programmers are users.

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.