GNU PSPP | Hacker News Reader

GNU PSPP

gnu.org

60 pointsgjvc15 comments

> It is a free as in freedom replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.

> The most important of these exceptions are, that there are no “time bombs”; your copy of PSPP will not “expire” or deliberately stop working in the future. Neither are there any artificial limits on the number of cases or variables which you can use. There are no additional packages to purchase in order to get “advanced” functions; all functionality that PSPP currently supports is in the core package.

It doesn't always land, but sometimes GNU manages the most delightful humor / sick burns.

For a second I read it as PPSSPP (the psp emulator).

What's new here?

Latest release from early May

https://savannah.gnu.org/news/?id=10361

I am glad someone made this post and I learned about this software. Never heard of it before even though I consider myself a GNU aficionado.

Glad it's of some interest! I have always wanted to learn SPSS, but never installed it, so happening across this was an interesting find.

New is relative to everyone's experience. Just because you are bang up-to-date, does not mean everyone else is. To many people it will be something they have never heard of before. I thought I knew the GNU landscape reasonably well, but had not yet heard of this program and thought it might be of interest to others.

What was the first version you used?

Was moreso asking what recent developments there'd been because hard to tell from general project homepage share...

In case there was some other reason you shared it (understand the 'of interest' reason)

In case there was some other reason you shared it (understand the 'of interest' reason)

You clearly don't, because your comment history shows you to consistently be bleating about "what's new here?", which in case you weren't aware is most off-putting.

For me it was new :)

Ditto

This isn't a programming language.

Is it correct to think of it as a data analysis application? Sort of spreadsheet, but more sophisticated/versatile?

Yes. The original SPSS is THE tool for researchers in psychology and other humanities when doing (advanced) statistics, since R requires familiarity with a command line/basic programming concepts.

I guess for basic statistics Excel might get used a lot too

Even in other medicine fields and academia.

Alas, whenever I tried PSPP as an alternative to SPSS, it seemee to lack a lot of functionality.

A better free alternative to look at if interested, is JASP.

It is a clone of SPSS.

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