If that’s Java or C++ then great but if an assortment of unix command line utilities (sort, uniq, grep, awk, sed, wc…) will work, even better. Software engineers and computer scientists, on the other hand, tend to have more of a hacker mindset: use whatever tool will get the job done. Corollary: Excel is not evil.Įconomists tend to be too wedded to particular tools (like STATA), maybe because most undergrad and grad courses teach only one or two econometrics tools (in the graduate classes I taught, I used STATA and Oxmetrics and R - but I’m pretty sure that’s unusual). And since one of my current projects is looking at what new-fangled ‘data scientists’ do, I thought I would assemble here some additional ‘lessons for economists from software engineering’ to complement Gentzkow and Shapiro’s. Social science and computer science is a great combination-it happens to be my background. Though we all write code for a living, few of the economists, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, or other empirical researchers we know have any formal training in computer science. Via my departmental maillist, this rather useful guide by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro at Chicago: Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner’s Guide. Thoughts on: Code and Data for the Social Sciences
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