Re: Evaluating PSPP

[John Darrington]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 03:02:27PM -0400, Andy Choens wrote:

     1) The company I work for is (mostly) using SPSS version 11. Is there a 
     roadmap that outlines the feature parity goals for upcoming versions of 
     PSPP? I have found the list of features/commands that are not yet 
     implemented, but I'm looking for information to help me know "when" PSPP 
     might be able to meet all of our needs as a company.

If you say what your company's needs are, then it'd be easier to
answer that question.  Other uses have identified repeated measures
anova (aka GLM), factor analysis and reliability analysis as things
they need, so these are probably going to be implemented in future
releases.  I personally have an interest in non-parametric statistics,
so you might see a few more of those too.

  Also, a better output system is on the cards
( http://jstover.motd.org/cgi-bin/oddmuse.cgi/NewOutputGoals )
     
     2) The authors of SPSS have identified programmability as an important 
     feature for SPSS. I noticed that they are now shipping versions of SPSS 
     with python as a scripting language (!!!) and the ability to interface 
     with R. As I understand it, R-CRAN is not going to become part of SPSS, 
     but if you have both R installed, that SPSS will be able to use R's 
     remote functionality and use R-CRAN modules in SPSS routines. I'm 
     curious to know if PSPP is planning on doing this as well.


A python interface is something that I think should definitely be
done.

With regard to R integration,  most people seem to suggest that
spss/pspp could be a front-end to R's engine.   That might be useful,
but I'd be much more interested in the opposite; would it be possible
to use R's syntax with PSPP's back-end?   A few simple tests should
convince you that PSPP is magnetudes faster than R, so I'm not keen on
the former option.

J'

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