I used GRETL some on graduate school. Thanks for the reminder.
Ultimately I wroteost of my own in Matlab, C, and Python. GRETL at the time wasn't consistent to the results in texts books (not always the fault of GRETL!).
R's a programming language. Gretl is a GUI program that was originally created for teaching econometrics. (You may not be aware that Gretl has been around for many years, so it's a legit question.)
R itself was first released in 1993, and is based on S / S-Plus which date to the 70s...moreover, these have been standard tools since the 80s at least, well before Gretl...
Ultimately I wroteost of my own in Matlab, C, and Python. GRETL at the time wasn't consistent to the results in texts books (not always the fault of GRETL!).