Posted by kobaltGIT 7 hours ago
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.
What do we gain from a plethora of SPSS-alike tools? Nothing. There's literally no explanation on this page about why anyone who uses SPSS 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.
What do we lose by fracturing all academic statistical analysis into a dozen different tools instead of 1? Lots!
It's not even clear the person creating this even intends 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.
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.
I'm extremely happy every time a closed format falls. Whether it's this one, Sibelius music scores, records from medical devices, data series from scientific measurements, or something else. Every one of them stopped me from doing something in the past (not on a technical level but "it's not worth spending a month on this") and I'll support efforts like this.
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.
Also, if you are referring to the similarly named ArtCraft suite as a "pointless activity" then you are really out of touch.
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?"
What'd you expect the rest of us to feel? Chastened?
I started this because I believe statistical software should not crash on malformed data, should be scriptable by AI agents via MCP, and should not cost thousands of dollars per year.
Current state (11 days in, solo):
- 14 statistical blocks audited against SPSS 24 Algorithms Guide with ≤1e-6 SciPy precision
- Full .sav/.zsav codec, Excel/CSV import, SPSS syntax parser (.sps)
- 37 SPSS-style dialogs, pivot tables, Output Viewer with TSV export
- Built-in MCP server for Claude/ChatGPT/Ollama agents
- Zero unwrap/expect/panic in production; fuzzed on corrupted inputs — 0 panics
What I need help with:
- Testers with real SPSS datasets (the weirder the encoding, the better)
- Rust developers for the expression evaluator (3 known precedence gaps)
- Statisticians to validate output against their SPSS workflows
- Anyone who wants to port a procedure (regression, factor, reliability are in)
I think I’ll pass.