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Comment by starpilot | Hacker News Reader

> The problem with Mathematica from a science point of view is that, being closed source, means you can't independently ensure the calculations are happening correctly. To be replicable, science involving data needs to use open source tools.

Excel and MATLAB can't be used for real science?

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At least you need to be very careful with them: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13...

Abstract: "The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."

Yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that 99% of the science/engineering/business world is reliant on Excel. Airplanes are designed in Excel.

I think your estimate of 99% is a wee bit high. At least in the field I'm familiar with, astronomy, the idea of using Excel for any serious computation or design would be met with laughter.

Well since the author is an economist, questions about "real science" can be interpreted a few ways.

For a fun look into the high standards of the field, a few years ago Piketty made the mistake of sharing his Excel files, in which all sorts of crucial adjustments were hard-coded into tables of data...

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/pi...

Matlab's fine, but Excel has (had?) some serious defects in the basic statistical functions, in particular, it coundn't reliably calculate a standard deviation.

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