Thread: Is C/C++ suitable for an econ student?

If you feel this way: "one obvious thing I notice is that it's far more difficult than Matlab/SAS, but it's a lot more interesting" then stay with it -- that's a choice, that's how you feel about it, and no doubt it is more interesting, just obviously being more difficult it will now sap more of your mind and time.

Are you sure you want to be an economist?

Originally Posted by Epy

MATLAB:
- is low level enough to let you do most anything manually and define your own functions, yet has so many built-in functions that you also have the ability to take the easy way out if you want to
- has a free clone, GNU Octave
- wins

Oh I wasn't questioning the value of pre-sizing arrays in MATLAB (or anywhere else, tho I that example looks somewhat "matlab specific"). Just to me it appears like it's in a niche akin to javascript or bash script -- a full fledged turing complete language, but dedicated to a specialized purpose and with limited "general" functionality. So the OP has expressed some fascination with programming concepts, maybe something like python would be good: you get the full range of normative C/C++ derived programming tools, sans the need for (much) memory management. And while python may be (lets say) sometimes 3 times slower than C++, the code base will be 3-5 times smaller. And the "speed" here is usually only going to resemble something relevant when you are dealing with hundreds of lines, in which case it might be worthwhile waiting 15 seconds to execute 200 lines of code vs. waiting 5 seconds waiting for 1000 lines, that you had to write. For stuff involving lots of disk read/writes, "execution speed" becomes purely theoretical -- like a ferrari in a 55mph zone is just a fragile overpriced gas guzzler.

I just say this because I will often write something quickly in perl, and then later if I like it, have time, etc, go back and re-write it in C (or more recently C++, which is closer match with the OO, but less optimizable IMO). There is a big big difference in the time required to do the work, and unless you are intent on a "production" quality product or dealing with incredibly massive amounts of data, it's probably not worth it (beyond, of course, personal satisfaction as applicable).

This is a pretty interesting site:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
It's primary criteria is execution speed, so you get C/C++ at the top, but it includes criteria for memory usage (which drastically divides the C from the C++) and code base (where C/C++ is closer to the bottom).