priceR VS poibin

I was an economist doing econometrics in excel when in 2014 the datasets went being a few 10,000's rows to a few 1,000,000's rows. I found R easiest to learn simply as a CS outsider because it was less strict about package versions and installation requirements, which made it easier for a beginner. I learned it by googling every little step ('how read in csv', 'how create new column in data.frame' etc) until I had a ~40 line R script that did what I was previously doing by hand in excel. It ran in a few seconds and did what took excel about 10 minutes.

A few years later I wrote an open source economics library in R: https://github.com/stevecondylios/priceR#pricer- It converts between nominal and real prices, converts between 171 currencies, and has a few regex's for pulling numeric data out of text (e.g. salaries out of job descriptions).

Some specific observations regarding the article:

- Comparing computation speed seems a bizarre metric to care about. 6x faster matters on things that take minutes, hours or days, but less so for operations that already run in under 1000ms. Developer experience is usually more important IME.

You can solve this type of problem using the Poisson Binomial distribution. The methods available can get a bit hairy. If you have a CS background, the easiest method may be to use something like this: https://github.com/tsakim/poibin . Alternatively, Monte Carlo simulations work well for this type of problem.