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That's just part of learning programming languages. Learn a language well, then decide. I thought Python was better than R, but a homoiconic functional language
by vsbuffalo 14y ago
That's just part of learning programming languages. Learn a language well, then decide. I thought Python was better than R, but a homoiconic functional language just makes sense for statistics. You get really neat functions like with, within, local, that let you keep everything tidy. S3/4 classes are hugely inspired by CLOS. It's also a great language for extending C with.
- houshuang 14y agoI've just been learning R for my grad studies (and general data exploration), and was really torn between R and Python, especially with IPython Notebook, pandas etc. I came from a Ruby background so both would be newish to me. What made me start with R (although I'm still following IPython dev, and will probably end up switching eventually) is the massive amount of material available to learn stats etc with R. I've seriously got something like a 100 textbooks on R on my system, intro to stats with R, machine learning with R, questionnaire analysis with R, bayesian stats with R... There are Coursera classes, the amazing r-bloggers.com, etc. For someone who is simultaneously learning statistics and a tool, this is invaluable. For Python, there's still very little. There's Wes' book, which is mostly about pandas and a lot of finance/time series stuff... I haven't seen a single "intro to stats in social sciences with Python"... There must be one book out there that is open source, which could just be rewritten with Python examples? (The most useful thing I've seen is people reworking examples from Machine Learning for Hackers, or one of the Coursera R courses, in Python).
- phren0logy 14y agoThere is one basic stats book using Python: http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/ http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/