Why we need more psychology programmers/EL Knife, a data utility for transforming spreadsheets

The software needs of psychology researchers are sufficiently diverse that they cannot be met by the commercial sector. The field needs more psychologists who publish software, and individual researchers need to be able to write their own. To support this view, the author offers EL Knife, a data utility for reconfiguring multifactor spreadsheet files. Data may be divided by up to four factors, each of which may have an unlimited number of levels. The interface makes it easy to specify a wide variety of different configurations (different ways of packing multiple data dimensions into a two-dimensional spreadsheet). Many other possibilities for useful research software remain to be invented.