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I've tried both R and Python for data analysis and data wrangling and the experience with R was a whole lot better for me (I work as a business intelligence con

I've tried both R and Python for data analysis and data wrangling and the experience with R was a whole lot better for me (I work as a business intelligence consultant). Python is really steeped in programmer culture, which you notice in everything from its user base to its manuals. Which is great for people who want to learn programming or study CS or so. But I'm not a programmer and I don't want to be. My biggest program ever written is maybe 150 lines to covert a mess of excel files to something usable. Programming is a necessary means to an end for me to do my job, but every time I tried to learn actual programming it bored me to tears. R, while I fully admit has a syntax which is clunky at best (although the tidyverse really helps here), does exactly what I need. Its users are all active in roughly the same space (data analysis in all its forms) so finding help is easy. The community is incredibly friendly, easily found on Twitter with the #rstats tag. It has packages for everything I would ever need. Basically, R helps me get things done, which is all it needs to do for me.

fritkot 8y ago
I think your post illustrates well why both languages are important to have. I also work in the Business Intelligence - space, but my job is usually more focussed on setting up data pipelines and developing a small specialized web app here and there. So if I'm already doing that, and I do analysis on top of that, of course I'm going to pick Python, because I can stay in the same ecosystem and I already have a better feeling for how things are going to work. But this wouldn't make sense at all for someone who generally works more on strategy and decision making and wants to dig a little deeper from time to time. Although when people ask me for a recommendation on what to learn, and they're actually interested in programming and building things themselves, I always recommend them to at least give Python a shot and see if they like it, as it then also gives them the possibility to do a lot of other things with the language.

fritkot 8y ago

I think your post illustrates well why both languages are important to have. I also work in the Business Intelligence - space, but my job is usually more focussed on setting up data pipelines and developing a small specialized web app here and there. So if I'm already doing that, and I do analysis on top of that, of course I'm going to pick Python, because I can stay in the same ecosystem and I already have a better feeling for how things are going to work. But this wouldn't make sense at all for someone who generally works more on strategy and decision making and wants to dig a little deeper from time to time. Although when people ask me for a recommendation on what to learn, and they're actually interested in programming and building things themselves, I always recommend them to at least give Python a shot and see if they like it, as it then also gives them the possibility to do a lot of other things with the language.