Data analysis software compared

I believe that adding new methods in statistical packages, to the point that each package now offers hundreds of functions (dozens of regressions, dozens of classifiers, dozens of time series methods and so on), is a bad idea. Most of these functions are never used. It only confuses the high-level user, and makes these packages not suitable for automated or black-box data science by non-statisticians (engineers, economists). If you really need that level of sophistication and fine-tuning, you are better off writing your own code in Perl, Python, or R or some other programming language. Dr Granville is currently working on a new approach to statistical software development.