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I’m going on a limb here and may get downvoted. But I’ll say it anyway. This battle is over, and Python is now the standard for data science, just like git is t
by geertj 7y ago
I’m going on a limb here and may get downvoted. But I’ll say it anyway. This battle is over, and Python is now the standard for data science, just like git is the standard for version control. The mindshare, number of tools, and number of people that know and use Python is an order of magnitude higher those for R. As a new data scientist it does not make sense to start with anything but Python.
- Gatsky 7y agoThis is manifestly untrue in some areas, for example bioinformatics.
- shusson 7y agoHmm I got the feeling that in genomics things were moving towards python too e.g https://github.com/hail-is/hail https://github.com/hail-is/hail.
- Gatsky 7y agoPeople are writing some nice bioinf software in python sure, but pull papers from Nature or Science and you will see heavy R usage. My point is that the contention that Python is the only game in town is just false.
- deng 7y agoWell, I'd say you're on a machine learning limb there, and "data science" is - at least IMHO - much more than that. As the article says, statisticians usually much prefer R over Python.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoMy feeling is that the statistician's preference of R is an historic artifact from when Python lacked clear ways to do things R documents nicely. And it seems to be changing.
- Annatar 7y agoThat's subjective. I maintain R where I work and more and more people are coming to me wanting to use it. I also maintain Python and the uptake isn't even 1% of what the want and need for R is. And that's with me not advertising either.
- ekianjo 7y agoI would say in the academic field it is far from being a clear cut at this stage and the growth of R packages is pretty stunning considering it is a very niche language.
- usgroup 7y agoIt’s not about R, it’s about CRAN. It blows python as a tool for specialised statistics out of the water and hence R is more standard for natural sciences, actuarial uses, medical, etc. R is a rubbish general purpose language and should not be used as a general purpose language. But it’s damn awesome for anything that considers matrices and vectors as the primary units of manipulation. Further, CRAN has everything ...
- AstralStorm 7y agoBecause PyPi doesn't? I'm being facetious here, PyPi is a few times bigger but less curated.