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Agreed. It's odd to charge money for this at all, given that there are such robust statistical tools for free (read: R). But on top of what you said, the fact

Agreed. It's odd to charge money for this at all, given that there are such robust statistical tools for free (read: R). But on top of what you said, the fact that trial versions can't export p-values is tacit endorsement of the "p < 0.0x is all that matters" camp, further promoting toxic statistical thinking. Promoting ease of use of tools and simplification of harder problems is great, but this is a really, really dangerous thing to make easy and oversimplified. Nope nope nope nope nope.

wenc 9y ago
To be fair, R isn't really that accessible to most social scientists. Heck, R isn't really that accessible to most programmers either. The tidyverse and R notebooks have definitely improved things by leaps and bounds, but R at its core is an unusual language. (I say this as a somewhat proficient R user) Its programmatic nature does aid in coming up with reproducible data analyses though. SPSS has, shall we say, a less than savory reputation. All this to say that there is a market for something much friendlier than R. R is used by pure statisticians, data scientists and the like, but most social scientists prefer Stata, which has pretty legit statistical routines as well as a point-and-click UI.
- Fomite 9y ago
  I'm fairly fond of JMP, which in my mind manages to thread the gap between "Easy UI" and "Push buttons until you get a p-value" decently.
  - singingfish 9y ago
    Yeah I quite like JMP. JMP for the easy routine stuff. R for when shit gets real. I don't do much stats these days though, so not having a JMP license, I just reach straight for R on the rare occasions I need it.
- catnaroek 9y ago
  > Heck, R isn't really that accessible to most programmers either. R is objectively a bad programming language. However, it is by no means inaccessible. I have no statistics background whatsoever, and I managed to learn enough R to be dangerous in a mere week. Other than the 1-based indexing and the utterly disgusting dynamic dispatch mechanism (you could simply not to use the latter), R is surprisingly pleasant to use. What I enjoyed the most is that vectors and matrices are first-class values, not objects that are referred to through pointers. It's probably copy-on-write under the hood, but I don't need to care. Hallelujah!
  - singingfish 9y ago
    It's not really an objectively bad language, it's just heavily optimised for one thing - the types of linear algebra calculations used for statistical analysis. For everything else (i.e. as a general purpose programming languate) it's awful. Which is why many languages have R bridges, so you can do the grunt work somewhere less insane.
    - catnaroek 9y ago
      No, R is objectively bad. There is nothing about linear algebra or statistics (which, btw, are not the only things R can do well) that mandates 1-based indices, or dynamic dispatch by appending class names to method names, or the various ways in which variables can be manipulated non-lexically for metaprogramming's sake. In particular, the the last feature is very powerful, but makes it impossible to prove anything about R scripts. Thank goodness trial and error in R produces less baffling results than in Python. At most you get the wrong value, noy “WTF is this nonsense? Why is this function mutating that remote object that it has no business touching?”.
- rz2k 9y ago
  As a proficient R user, though, you probably agree that it makes a certain sense when you get into a rhythm. I think it surprisingly makes a lot of sense to social scientists, in spite of seeming backwards to computer scientists. I remember being in school and using STATA, and just plugging in numbers to get through exercises too quickly to bother understanding what the labs were about. R seems to make you stop to realize what you are doing at the right moments, then uses a lot of magic to abstract away almost everything else.
- billfruit 9y ago
  Personally I found that Pandas was more easy to use than R, especially you can use the rest of python ecosystem for say interfacing with databases and data format conversations.
  - wanderfowl 9y ago
    Absolutely. I'm sort of hoping to see Python/Pandas eclipse R at some point in my career. But for now, my field is only reluctantly in R, and advising colleagues and students into Python is... non-trivial.
kome 9y ago
R is a trainwreck...
mnky9800n 9y ago
What does that even mean anyways. I mean I can write down the p value it reports. But that's useless to me without the associated statistic and whatever model I eventually build that was motivated by the spurious correlations I found in the first place.

wenc 9y ago

To be fair, R isn't really that accessible to most social scientists. Heck, R isn't really that accessible to most programmers either. The tidyverse and R notebooks have definitely improved things by leaps and bounds, but R at its core is an unusual language. (I say this as a somewhat proficient R user) Its programmatic nature does aid in coming up with reproducible data analyses though. SPSS has, shall we say, a less than savory reputation. All this to say that there is a market for something much friendlier than R. R is used by pure statisticians, data scientists and the like, but most social scientists prefer Stata, which has pretty legit statistical routines as well as a point-and-click UI.

Fomite 9y ago
I'm fairly fond of JMP, which in my mind manages to thread the gap between "Easy UI" and "Push buttons until you get a p-value" decently.
- singingfish 9y ago
  Yeah I quite like JMP. JMP for the easy routine stuff. R for when shit gets real. I don't do much stats these days though, so not having a JMP license, I just reach straight for R on the rare occasions I need it.
catnaroek 9y ago
> Heck, R isn't really that accessible to most programmers either. R is objectively a bad programming language. However, it is by no means inaccessible. I have no statistics background whatsoever, and I managed to learn enough R to be dangerous in a mere week. Other than the 1-based indexing and the utterly disgusting dynamic dispatch mechanism (you could simply not to use the latter), R is surprisingly pleasant to use. What I enjoyed the most is that vectors and matrices are first-class values, not objects that are referred to through pointers. It's probably copy-on-write under the hood, but I don't need to care. Hallelujah!
- singingfish 9y ago
  It's not really an objectively bad language, it's just heavily optimised for one thing - the types of linear algebra calculations used for statistical analysis. For everything else (i.e. as a general purpose programming languate) it's awful. Which is why many languages have R bridges, so you can do the grunt work somewhere less insane.
  - catnaroek 9y ago
    No, R is objectively bad. There is nothing about linear algebra or statistics (which, btw, are not the only things R can do well) that mandates 1-based indices, or dynamic dispatch by appending class names to method names, or the various ways in which variables can be manipulated non-lexically for metaprogramming's sake. In particular, the the last feature is very powerful, but makes it impossible to prove anything about R scripts. Thank goodness trial and error in R produces less baffling results than in Python. At most you get the wrong value, noy “WTF is this nonsense? Why is this function mutating that remote object that it has no business touching?”.
rz2k 9y ago
As a proficient R user, though, you probably agree that it makes a certain sense when you get into a rhythm. I think it surprisingly makes a lot of sense to social scientists, in spite of seeming backwards to computer scientists. I remember being in school and using STATA, and just plugging in numbers to get through exercises too quickly to bother understanding what the labs were about. R seems to make you stop to realize what you are doing at the right moments, then uses a lot of magic to abstract away almost everything else.
billfruit 9y ago
Personally I found that Pandas was more easy to use than R, especially you can use the rest of python ecosystem for say interfacing with databases and data format conversations.
- wanderfowl 9y ago
  Absolutely. I'm sort of hoping to see Python/Pandas eclipse R at some point in my career. But for now, my field is only reluctantly in R, and advising colleagues and students into Python is... non-trivial.

kome 9y ago

R is a trainwreck...

mnky9800n 9y ago

What does that even mean anyways. I mean I can write down the p value it reports. But that's useless to me without the associated statistic and whatever model I eventually build that was motivated by the spurious correlations I found in the first place.