Choosing Julia, Matlab, Python or R in economics?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • SciPy

    SciPy library main repository

  • poibin

    Poisson Binomial Probability Distribution for Python

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
  • priceR

    Economics and Pricing in R

  • 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.

  • QuantEcon.jl

    Julia implementation of QuantEcon routines

  • > wasn't aware he added Julia now.

    FWIW, it wasn't a recent addition. It was added in 2015 so it's quite matured. https://github.com/QuantEcon/QuantEcon.jl/graphs/contributor...

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts