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Authors: Sanford Weisberg
Title: [download]
(3155)
Lost Opportunities: Why We Need a Variety of Statistical Languages
Reference: Vol. 13, Issue 1, Dec 2004
Submitted 2004-04-12, Accepted 2004-12-20
Type: Article
Abstract:

To the worker who only has a hammer, we are told, everything looks like a nail. Solutions to applied statistical problems are framed by the limitations imposed by statistical computing packages and languages. For better or worse, we can do what the packages do; we cannot do what the packages won't do. Statistical languages like R have basic tools that allow the analyst to design new hammers, but even in R we cannot build an arbitrary hammer, only ones within the limits imposed by the R language. XLISP-STAT imposes different limitations, so we can produce different hammers.

In this article, I look at some of the tools in XLISP-STAT that allow the user to think about graphics in ways that cannot be easily replicated in other statistical languages. The interactive graphical methods available in XLISP-STAT lead to very different methodology than would be developed without the tools that XLISP-STAT provides. The general approach to graphics and indeed to data analysis in general is quite different in a package like Arc that is built on top of XLISP-STAT, than it is in other statistical packages. We discuss why that might be true, and why this depends on design options created by XLISP-STAT.

Paper: [download]
(3155)
Lost Opportunities: Why We Need a Variety of Statistical Languages
(application/pdf, 390.3 KB)
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