Well, i said that it was a little caricatural...
Of course i did not mean that ecologists are more stupid than other
scientists. I was not talking about the ease of use of the software.
The Unix version of Splus is very easy to use from this point of view
(in fact if you already know Unix, you have nearly nothing to learn
to start using it, so it is quite easy indeed). I think however that
ecologists are less good at statistics than statisticians (and that
statisticians are less good at ecology). From this point of view, I
think that ADE-4 is easier to use than Splus because you need less
statistical knowledge to use it.
Another important point is that neither Splus nor ExploRe are available
for Macintosh. We started working on ADE-4 on Macintosh and the graphics
are much better and much easier to use on Mac. This is important because
graphics are one of the more interesting things in ADE-4 on Mac. The
Windows and Unix versions are far behind from this point of view.
There are some problems however, and several people told me that they
could never figure out how to use ADE-4. We shall have to deal with this,
mainly for the user interface (HyperCard is being abandonned by Apple and
WinPlus has already disappeared), the binary/text transformations, the data
folder, etc...
About Linux, i wonder how many scientists (ecologists, molecular biologists,
statisticians or anything you want) would like to spend the time needed to
set up Linux on their computer and find out that they are unable to send a
MS Word file to their colleagues. Of course, if everybody was using LaTeX...
BTW, the Unix/Java version of ADE-4 i am working on will probably be quite
easy to adapt to Linux !
-- Jean Thioulouse - Laboratoire de Biometrie - Universite Lyon 1 69622 Villeurbanne Cedex - France Fax: 04 78 89 27 19 Tel: 04 72 43 29 01 http://pbil.univ-lyon1.fr/ADE-4/JTHome.html
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