lbr's recent activity

  1. Comment on King Charles III diagnosed with cancer, postponing public duties in ~news

    lbr
    Link Parent
    Which makes perfect sense for me as that’s basically the setting in the HoI4 alt-history mod Kaiserreich. And this leads to frictions between the old British monarchist elite and local Canadian...

    Which makes perfect sense for me as that’s basically the setting in the HoI4 alt-history mod Kaiserreich. And this leads to frictions between the old British monarchist elite and local Canadian politics.

    4 votes

  2. Comment on MATLAB learning resources for software engineers in ~comp

    lbr
    Link Parent
    Thank you, that’s reassuring. I’ll continue to try and be responsible when using save/load. And I’ll have a look at snakemake, sounds useful

    Thank you, that’s reassuring. I’ll continue to try and be responsible when using save/load. And I’ll have a look at snakemake, sounds useful

  3. Comment on MATLAB learning resources for software engineers in ~comp

    lbr
    (edited )
    Link
    Can you say a bit more about sharing state between scripts? I think I might be guilty of that. The problem is that I have numerical simulations which run for a long time. So I can’t do everything...

    Can you say a bit more about sharing state between scripts? I think I might be guilty of that. The problem is that I have numerical simulations which run for a long time. So I can’t do everything in one go. What’s the best way of doing that - if save workspace isn’t it?

    Speaking as an economist, Matlab is absolutely ubiquitous and unavoidable for me. The vast majority of literature in my field (empirical macro/time series) uses Matlab for the reasons that you mentioned. It’s so easy to implement new estimators by just writing down the algebra.

    However, these are typically rather small-scale projects with just a couple of scripts. Examples of bigger pieces of software that I’m aware of are the ECB‘s BEAR toolbox (though the underlying code looks pretty terrible tbh). Or the dynare package which is very popular for a certain class of macroeconomic models.

    The problem is that there really is no alternative. To me, R and Python just aren’t good substitutes, though Julia is making inroads. But that of course doesn’t solve the coordination problem.