>I can't into R
Does safety matter for this kind of software? It’s mostly internal tooling used by researchers and statisticians. I get it rust is cool but safety isn’t the prime concern here I think.
Sorry but the problem is not primarily software, it’s community, teaching and standardization.<p>We have R/tidyverse which does 90% of everything and has an amazing community and procedures eg. around documentation. For everything else you have excel or python. So I don’t see the use case.
There are tons of people in the social sciences that still, unfortunately, use SPSS to this day. If you think that R/tidyverse/Excel is a true alternative to SPSS, you definitely haven't interacted with any of these people.
I have, in fact, professionally interacted with, published with and taught these people for almost 20 years ;)
Ah, are you a statistical consultant? That would explain a lot, but you should then know why these people need you. Or maybe you're in a department where the statistical standards are much higher than in mine.
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This is one of the things that makes me negative on AI. Before AI, no one would have done this. Because it's a huge amount of effort and a total waste of time. Now we have AI, we have this explosion in people going off and doing all these pointless activities.<p>What do we gain from a plethora of SPSS-alike tools? Nothing. There's literally no explanation on this page about why anyone <i>who uses SPSS</i> would want to use this. But it's "100% Safe Rust". Yes, that's a feature that someone who likes rust wants, not what someone who uses SPSS wants.<p>What do we lose by fracturing all academic statistical analysis into a dozen different tools instead of 1? Lots!<p>It's not even clear the person creating this even <i>intends</i> for anyone to use it. So (a) why are they doing it and (b) how do you even know if it actually works if absolutely no one is using it. In fact the danger now is someone who doesn't know the author is just an AI slop dilletante comes along looking for an SPSS-like tool and makes the mistake of trying to use it.<p>Is there really any difference between this and the people posting AI slop onto their reddit accounts. It's just raising the noise floor to the point where we're going to have to essentially shut down the public internet, everything of value will move to closed spaces.
Sorry, but this really comes across as demonstrating a substantial degree of entitlement. What is the purpose? Easy. A student is trained to use SPSS for their thesis work. They may be given a sitewise license from their university, but only for one device. Then after their training, they lose access to SPSS, but want to do that analysis in their workplace.<p>Proprietary software, especially at these prices, cause all kinds of issues. SPSS is one of the software packages that has a sizeable audience of people crying out for a true open source alternative. Just because you have the money to afford these things, does not mean that others do.<p>Also, if you are referring to the similarly named ArtCraft suite as a "pointless activity" then you are <i>really</i> out of touch.
I'm (well, my LLM is) Rewriting IBM SPSS Statistics in 100% Safe Rust, Alone (for a given value of alone).<p>You even let your LLM write the README.<p>Look, we nearly all use LLMs these days, but the phrasing of "I am... ...alone" is particularly weird when it's obviously not just you, it's you with LLMs.<p>Maybe title it as "A rewrite of IBM SPSS Statistics in Rust with no unsafe" - the 100% safe claim is something an LLM makes, it's not something a reasonable human would say, as it implies the Rust is totally safe, whereas you're trying to communicate that your Rust code uses no unsafe blocks, and these are two different things.
The title "I'm...100% Safe Rust, Alone" is obnoxious.<p>Op, is there any technical merit to this, or is this a step in some process to earn brownie points in some pathetic "I'm a morally superior hero club?"<p>What'd you expect the rest of us to feel? Chastened?
Why not let go of SPSS instead? It has run its course and is basically legacy legacy software by now. But it good fun I suppose? Are you using SPSS as an oracle? (Guessing that the author is/will be in the comments.)<p>An oracle and fuzzing have been excellent when reimplementing software. Given implausible inputs, the black box shows its colours quickly. Rounding errors and different representations of floats are and endless source of debugging, eh, joy.
But why?
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