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Computation speed is only one of many criteria. It can be important. We have R code that takes hours to run, and for another paper it takes 5 minutes for the R
by y_lin 4y ago
Computation speed is only one of many criteria. It can be important. We have R code that takes hours to run, and for another paper it takes 5 minutes for the R code every time we change something. Speed is certainly important but not the only criteria.
I agree, it would certainly be useful to compare the most useful libraries, for economists dynlm is fantastic in R. But we only have so many words in blog piece like this, and we didn’t have space
I stand by the historical baggage. If you compare R (and the others) to Julia, there are so many bizarre and inconsistent language features they carry with them. Julia doesn’t have a lot, it might have made bad design decisions as Yuri argues, but it’s not historical baggage.
- nomilk 4y ago5 minutes for every change definitely justifies language/library selection based on optimising for compute time. I do operations that are nowdays computationally trivial, for example, tinkering with model specifications, which, even for rows in the millions, typically takes <1 second of compute time. A typical workflow would involve minutes/hours of wrangling, minutes/hours of model spec, and perhaps only a small number of minutes actually waiting for computation to complete. With some exceptions, of course. Btw thanks for a very interesting take on a generally neglected topic (language choice for economists). I hope you do more and deeper discussion on this as I think a lot of economists never make it to open source and get stuck using whatever they learned in university (eviews or spss).