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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

> Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.

I'm biased since I don't know spreadsheets at all, but I think Python code would have been far more reviewable.

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That bad justification for choosing a very wrong tool for the job does not instill confidence for other logic employed by the author.

“I used the tool that obfuscates my work that I’m trying to get others to review and buy in on because I consider myself hopeless at clearer tools and don’t want to even try. Why will no one engage with my obfuscated work?”

I mean even he admits he made and corrected a ton of mistakes in his beast of excel. It’s absurd to think anyone would want to wade through that mess.

Intentional or not, if one makes it impractical and unreasonable to crosscheck ones work then critics shouldn’t be expected to unravel it to point to the internal error. They only need to point to external evidence in the contrary.

With a spreadsheet you can see the result of each computation, and you can easily manually tweak values if you want to play around.

Programmers might have an easier time checking a program for bugs than a spreadsheet, but most economists aren't programmers, right? The stereotype I have, at least, is that the experts for this domain are happier in spreadsheets than python. And it seems to me that the main issue for this sort of think would come from economics rather than programming issues.

You will find many economists that have some programming ability, just like in any other field nowadays: It's too useful an analytical skill. What they will do, however, is work on, say, a Jupyter notebook, which is as easier to fiddle with as a spreadsheet once you have basics of programming down, while getting rid of almost every disadvantage the spreadsheet has. You will find this in industry too: The researcher building the model is using the notebook, and then there's no need for an excel to code translation: The important bits can just be copied over directly.

I know "spreadsheeters" and I strongly suspect the author is right about his own programming incompetency.

I've seen plenty in both realms that were impenetrable.

There are dozens of examples in the wild of python code getting reviewed, corrected, and enhanced. I’m not a spreadsheet expert. Does that even happen for spreadsheets?

The most high-profile story is some grad students at UMass getting ahold of the spreadsheets powering the calculations in a high-profile economics paper by Reinhart and Rogoff about national debt levels, and finding elementary errors that destroyed the work.

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