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Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

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Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#31

Post by harshgupta »

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #25

I use Python and it's OK, but I find a lot of the breathless hype around it as a language a little baffling as there are more than an average number of stupidities in there. However this piece is really around exploiting the amazing infrastructure that has built up around Python that empowers mathematical and statistical research, which is fair enough.

> As there are more than an average number of stupidities there.

Please post more meaningful comments. Sure it doesn't have static typing or performance of C, but it has a stable framework in every conceivable application (Web Dev, machine learning, CLI, you name it) and works as a top notch scripting language. This is not "stupidity", it was by design to make it batteries included and easy to use with a tradeoff with the above things.

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#32

Post by dunpeal »

Insanity wrote: post #30
dunpeal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these "stupidities" that bother you? Personally, I use Python a lot for anything related to data science. No language is perfect, but I'd say Python has a lot less deficiencies and warts than most other mainstream languages, and it's extremely well suited for tasks in data science and related fields such as machine learning. The main issue with Python is that its default platform (CPython) isn't very efficie…

Whilst that is true, for data science related things I end up using Pandas (and Numpy) often which are fast. So most of the heavy lifting is not done by python itself.

Yes, that's the case for most data scientists, and often for users in general. You can get pretty good performance levels from Python by delegating to C correctly. Even end users tend to do that because the data science stack of Python (numpy and the many libraries using it) spend almost all of their runtime in C routines.

If you are using Numpy correctly (even with little understanding of Python itself and its C-API) then virtually all your hot loops are executed in optimal C code.

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#33

Post by leemailll »

lellotope wrote: post #16

Am I missing something or are parts of this article really distorted? For example, this seems to set up most of the article: "Economics involves a lot of math and statistics. The most commonly used tools to crunch numbers are the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel and programming languages Stata and Mathematica." Is this really true? Mathematica and Stata seem like established but niche products to me at this point…

Academy is really slow to pick up the trend. And when one group collect years of legacy codes it is even harder to change

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#34

Post by japanuspus »

AlanSE wrote: post #23
mxuribe wrote: post #14

Beyond the cool python angle, I find the following statement quite interesting: "...James Somers argued that Jupyter notebooks may replace the traditional research paper typically shared as a PDF..." I've only been exposed to jupyter notebook references here and there...but i guess i should become a little more familiar with them.

While I think this is a good thing, an additional requirement is needed. The published notebook should be sequentially executed by an automated tool. Users can execute commands out of order and have artifacts from deleted commands. Without verification, you can be publishing notebooks with bugs in them that you don't see until you re-execute them.

Tools for combining the interactive work in notebooks with a more predictable linear flow are starting to mature. See for instance jupytext [1]: a bi-directional converter between jupyter notebooks and python/R/julia/... I believe jupytext was featured here on HN a few weeks back.

[1] https://github.com/mwouts/jupytext

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#36

Post by xapata »

lellotope wrote: post #16

Am I missing something or are parts of this article really distorted? For example, this seems to set up most of the article: "Economics involves a lot of math and statistics. The most commonly used tools to crunch numbers are the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel and programming languages Stata and Mathematica." Is this really true? Mathematica and Stata seem like established but niche products to me at this point…

My grad program taught SAS, to my dismay.

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#37

Post by dagw »

lellotope wrote: post #16

Am I missing something or are parts of this article really distorted? For example, this seems to set up most of the article: "Economics involves a lot of math and statistics. The most commonly used tools to crunch numbers are the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel and programming languages Stata and Mathematica." Is this really true? Mathematica and Stata seem like established but niche products to me at this point…

I'm not an economist so maybe this is something about economics.

Stata seems to be really popular in economics. Certainly when I was getting my degree all the statistics, modelling and econometric courses at the economics department used either Excel or Stata. A few 'weird' kids used matlab, but the words "Python" or "R" where never mentioned.

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#39

Post by xapata »

prepend wrote: post #19
lellotope wrote: post #16

Am I missing something or are parts of this article really distorted? For example, this seems to set up most of the article: "Economics involves a lot of math and statistics. The most commonly used tools to crunch numbers are the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel and programming languages Stata and Mathematica." Is this really true? Mathematica and Stata seem like established but niche products to me at this point…

“If you asked me to predict what a quantitative economist would be using, it would be Python, followed by R, and maybe followed by Java or C, or something like that.” I too was looking for good data. It’s hard to measure this as practical application doesn’t line up with publication. I was surprised when I started working in health 10 years ago that the predominant tool was Excel, and then SAS. Even 5 years ago in he…

Some departments in the FDA require clinical trial data to be submitted in SAS formats :-/

Re: Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert

#40

Post by dnautics »

dunpeal wrote: post #29
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #25

I use Python and it's OK, but I find a lot of the breathless hype around it as a language a little baffling as there are more than an average number of stupidities in there. However this piece is really around exploiting the amazing infrastructure that has built up around Python that empowers mathematical and statistical research, which is fair enough.

What are these "stupidities" that bother you? Personally, I use Python a lot for anything related to data science. No language is perfect, but I'd say Python has a lot less deficiencies and warts than most other mainstream languages, and it's extremely well suited for tasks in data science and related fields such as machine learning. The main issue with Python is that its default platform (CPython) isn't very efficie…

Here's a classic:

    def a(arg = []):
      return arg
    
    a([1])        #==> [1]
    arr = a()     #==> []
    arr.append(1)
    a()           #==> [1]
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