Follow up on NextAnalytics challenge

My post “MDX answer to NextAnalytics challenge” triggered some very active discussion, and I would like to address some of the comments

Chris Webb said:
I've done a fair amount of teaching MDX and the truth is that people do find even the basics very difficult to understand, but my feeling is that the problem people have with MDX is not the language as such but thinking a) multidimensionally and b) in sets. The question is then, does Ward's new language solve either of these problems? Or has he reinvented the wheel?

I agree with the a) part, but not with the b) part. Thinking multidimensional is hard and take some time to get used to. However thinking in sets is not hard at all. SQL language is mostly based on relational algebra and uses sets extensively. Practitioners don’t find sets difficult.

Thomas Ivarsson said:
Can you publish the entire script at the end of this blog post? My conclusion is that we need better clients that can create these analytics sets at run time. End users will never do this and it is impossible to create all sets that the business users would like to have. It will fill up a cube in no time.

I am pessimistic that we will ever see such sophisticated clients. If they were in demand, we would’ve already had them. I am afraid the users will have to code such analytics either using MDX or NextAnalytics script or something else. End users don’t have any problem building such sets in Excel, so maybe Excel is our hope ?