Remove cookiecutter, change to minimal spec

[timmens]

Janos and I thought about the future of the econ-project-templates given the experience of the 2023 EPP iteration:

Problems

• Students do not understand cookiecutter dialogue
• Students do not understand the "concept cookiecutter" (e.g., students don't grasp the
  difference between project and cookiecutter)
• Connecting the downloaded project to GitHub often fails (especially if the remote is not
  empty) and is perceived as very complicated even if it works (e.g., clone link vs URL)
• Example project is out of date, especially data management (should be done by Hans-Martin and
  Tim)
• When cookiecutter fails, or you want to edit previous input, it is very annoying to
  start over (fails, for example when the folder already exists, the environment already exists)
  • There is the replay option, but it is unknown, and does not seem to work perfectly

Observations

• Cookiecutter replaces something students like to do: copying files and adjusting names
  with something they do not understand and do not like to do
• Students are usually not informed enough to make decisions about e.g. licenses, make
  initial commit, which types of pre-commits, creating the environment or not. It seems
  like fewer choices would make students feel better while doing the setup.
• The Julia, Stata and R examples are not used and they are another part of the code
  base that needs to be kept up-to-date (we could just reference the pytask
  documentation)

Solution Ideas

• Replace cookiecutter dialogue by minimal form:
  • project slug (-> rename to project name)
  • author name
  • author email
• Form checks inputs in real-time, after filling it out, there appears a download button
• Reference to videos like "how to create environment" appears
• Workflow:
  • Students create repo on github
  • Students clone empty repo
  • Students download files from example project into empty repo
  • Students push added project to remote

Additional (Potential) Developer Benefits

• Removing the example projects for other programming languages makes it easier to
  maintain
• Removing cookiecutter complexity makes it easier to test and maintain the example
  project

[hmgaudecker]

As discussed off-line, this generally sounds like a good plan. Thanks for bringing it up!

Let's tackle it at some point this year.

Probably this should be converted into a template repo then. And we could have a simple Python script as part of the repo, which does the adjustments like

• project slug (-> rename to project name)
• author name
• author email

and after being run, removes itself.

[hmgaudecker]

Should tackle #138 as part of this.

[hmgaudecker]

In the process, we should make sure that all relevant bits of the data and code standard of journals are covered.