TY - JOUR AU - Weisberg, Sanford PY - 2004/12/20 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Lost Opportunities: Why We Need a Variety of Statistical Languages JF - Journal of Statistical Software JA - J. Stat. Soft. VL - 13 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.18637/jss.v013.i01 UR - https://www.jstatsoft.org/index.php/jss/article/view/v013i01 SP - 1 - 12 AB - 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. ER -