Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer is a Python programming convert
Am I missing something or are parts of this article really distorted?<p>For example, this seems to set up most of the article:<p>"Economics involves a lot of math and statistics. The most commonly used tools to crunch numbers are the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel and programming languages Stata and Mathematica."<p>Is this really true? Mathematica and Stata seem like established but niche products to me at this point. I wouldn't say either of them are "the most commonly used tools to crunch numbers."<p>If you asked me to predict what a quantitative economist would be using, it would be Python, followed by R, and maybe followed by Java or C, or something like that.<p>This was an interesting article in the sense I like learning these sorts of things about people, but the premise seemed off to me.<p>But I'm not an economist so maybe this is something about economics per se.