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Hadley Whickam also stressed the importance of readability and reproducibility of code vs software like Excel. A sequence of manipulations and button presses doesn't leave a clear history for others in your team to understand or quickly test and reproduce your work to validate, or apply to be data sets.

For work to be "science", it really ought to be transparent and reproducible within your community (eg, team within your firm).

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This is an important point too. I'm still amused by the story of the "Growth in a Time of Debt" paper. Two famous Harvard economist made an Excel mistake (among other things) that completely changed the conclusion of their study and ultimately affected real-world economic policies.

Here is a summary of the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel...

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