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by bachmeier 3852 days ago
The real news here is not the move to Julia (although that is likely to be the reason for most of the attention). The important thing is the move to open - an open language, movement to Github, nice explanation of the details.
1 comments
grayclhn 3852 days ago
No. A central bank moving at all to Julia is absolutely fucking huge.
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pzone 3852 days ago
Agreed. I worked on the FRBNY research floor, this model has real mindshare with policy makers, porting it is a huge investment in the language. They may be training scads of RAs in writing and using Julia, many of them will go off and do PhDs later.
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grayclhn 3852 days ago
This also provides a lot of justification/support for those of us who'd much rather teach (say) macroeconometrics in julia instead of matlab.
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bachmeier 3852 days ago
I suppose it depends on whether you think it's important for the popularity of Julia (something I don't care much about, since it's just a programming language) or because you think open science and policymaking is important (which I do).

[I see you're from Iowa State. I'm posting this from the house I bought from John Crespi a few months ago.]

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grayclhn 3852 days ago
Small world, his office is the floor below mine :)

I think we probably agree then --- but this announcement isn't exactly a sea change in open science and policymaking. This model (or one very close to it) has been available on various people's webpages for a while [1], the research on estimating and using DGSE models for forecasting and policy-making has been well documented and openly discussed, etc. And the NY Fed has put out a lot of "accessible" information about features of the model and interpretations of its results.

[1]: http://sites.sas.upenn.edu/schorf/pages/working-papers

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