These newer programs are a far cry from the statistics programs many scientists cut their teeth on in graduate school--programs with little or no graphics, driven by batch files of nonintuitive commands. Take, for example, a drug company researcher who is running an experiment comparing the effects of two drug formulations on two groups of rats, a control group and a group whose immunity has been compromised.
Traditionally, the scientist running statistics on this experiment had to write complicated programming instructions telling the computer what the experimental designs were; which treatments to compare; what, if any, data were to be left out; and any other information necessary to complete the run. The researcher had to construct a data file to the exact specifications of the program being used, and, finally, send the whole mess to a remote mainframe computer. The mainframe would then follow the instructions in the batch file, ...
