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Comment by petargyurov | Hacker News Reader

From the linked paper:

> Using Microsoft Excel, version 16, with the Crystal Ball add-in, the team developed a computational transmission, clinical, and economics outcomes model

I did not expect the simulation model to be written in Excel. Never heard of "Crystal Ball" before. From Oracle's website:

> Use Monte Carlo simulation to automatically calculate and record the results of thousands of different what–if cases

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It is well known in the Excel modelling world and a lot of people use Excel for modelling.

I’m not sure coding these things up is always a great idea. I’ve done various types of programming over the years but in Excel you get things like dependency tracing, error checking, UIs for every components, Excel does have advantages for a lot of work. The equivalent code these domain experts produce is usually pretty awful.

And that’s part of the reproducibility crisis. R/Python code published on GitHub is a much better way.

There‘s whole books on numerical simulation with Excel. Which is absolutely incomprehensible - if you are math-wise enough to do simulations, you should be computer-wise enough to use a real programming language.

I’ve done this type of numerical work in code and it’s much more difficult than it first appears. It’s not like web development this stuff is much more like real computer science.

Tools like Excel and Matlab exist for a reason.

Matlab, yes. Matlab code can be versioned, and opened in VIM for independent review. It can have unit and integration tests. It can also often be run in alternative implementations with few changes, such as Octave.

Excel? You'd be lucky if Excel N-2 can properly handle the file, much less an "alternative implementation" such as LibreOffice Calc.

You can have manual tests (automated through VBA if you wanted) and reviews. The review tools are lesser known features built into Excel. I know from my experience accounting firms will take your spreadsheets and code too and audit it. I’ve worked with bankers who would effectively run a suite of tests before using their updated spreadsheets. These concepts aren’t unique to programming.

Curious as to how your claim follows?

I upvoted this. It's quite a lot more important than your elegant one-liner reveals. I think there's a gaping hole in many people's skills that need to be addressed. We're educating people in how certain models work, with lots of equations and diagrams, but we don't give most people access to the power of computation that would greatly help their studies.

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