Verbally describing statistics accurately and succinctly is often difficult. Needle and Thread offers a better way. In a recent paper on Thread, Glenn McDonald, the Thread designer, stated:
The Thread query describes a path through the data … we believe that it is more expressive, easier to map to the shapes of human inquiry, and far more compact and data-focused. These may be enough to give the query language a qualitatively different role: a tool not just for people to talk to machines about data, but for people to talk to themselves and each other about data in such a way that machines can participate in, and inform, the discussions.
With Needle and Thread, you can understand statistics by seeing how they’re calculated and experimenting with alternatives.