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Right. I made the mistake recently of asking for a function that produced Wilson confidence intervals and the not checking the results line by line, because the code looked plausible as did the outputs. It wasn’t for production code, so I was in hack mode. It totally messed up the formula, which a colleague picked up when he compared the results to ones he got from Excel. Because it’s often right, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trusting it, but even if it works, the code is sometimes stupid. I have found it to be a massive accelerator but it has severe limitations, not least corroding the ability of coders to solve problems independently.

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Pierz Newton-John
Pierz Newton-John

Written by Pierz Newton-John

Writer, coder, former psychotherapist, founding member of The School Of Life Melbourne. Essayist for Dumbo Feather magazine, author of Fault Lines (fiction).

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