Yeah I'm finding myself explaining the difference between shell and Python a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873284 https://news.ycombinator.com/it

Yeah I'm finding myself explaining the difference between shell and Python a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873284 Shell is good for creating Unix systems because of the tools it provides. ... It's hard to explain, but if you work in that area, you'll very quickly see it. I think many people have learned one language, or 3 languages that are similar, and they think all languages do roughly the same thing. That's incorrect on all counts: in terms of the core data model, the operators, and the libraries. If you do a lot of work in a specific domain, you'll start to see all the differences. Shell is the best tool for bringing up machines, which happens a lot in both the cloud/web and embedded spaces. ---- Ditto for R. R makes a lot of tasks really easy, and a lot of other ones really hard (like being 10x slower than Python, or 1000x slower than C, for many tasks). That sounds horrifying, but it really helps you get a lot of work done. Another thing people have trouble appreciating is the difference between R and Matlab, and Matlab and Mathematica. Those 3 languages are drastically different because of both their core data model and who uses them.