There are literally hundreds of programming languages out there, e.g. the whole alphabet of one letter programming languages is taken. In the area of data science there are two big contenders: R and Python. Now why is this blog about R and not Python?
I have to make a confession: I really wanted to like Python. I dug deep into the language and some of its extensions. Yet, it never really worked for me. I think one of the problems is that Python tries to be everybody’s darling. It can do everything… and its opposite. No, really, it is a great language to learn programming but I think it has some really serious flaws. I list some of them here:
One of the main reasons for using Python in the data science arena is shrinking by the day: Neural Networks. The main frameworks like Tensorflow and APIs like Keras used to be controlled by Python but there are now excellent wrappers available for R too (https://tensorflow.rstudio.com/ and https://keras.rstudio.com/).
All in all I think that R is really the best choice for most data science applications. The learning curve may be a little bit steeper at the beginning but when you get to more sophisticated concepts it becomes easier to use than Python.
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