On Wed, 14 Mar 2018, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
I'm all for learning more languages and using the one that's best for each job, but for people who don't know Python, it would be helpful to list the aspects in which it excels. When should an R user choose to write something in Python instead?
Duncan, "Best" is subjective, but my view is the language most comfortable and familiar to the developer/analyst should be the one used. In my environmental consulting business I use both R and Python. While Python has support for many statistical models I'm more comfortable with the ones available in R. For spatial analyses (separate from spatial statistics) I've used GRASS for > 20 years and it heavily uses Python. I also use Python (along with emacs, awk, sed, and grep) for cleaning and organizing data. For writing, I use LaTeX (a markup language) and the LyX GUI front end. Python has a lot of support for scientific and financial analyses, as does R. Considering there are a gazillion programming languages available (and used for essential applications, such as GnuCash (written in guile, a scheme variant) which I use for business and personal bookkeeping, picking the "best" one is strictly a personal matter. I prefer emacs, my system and network admin friends prefer vi. In linux, at least, there are so many options for doing a task that sometimes it's difficult to decide which to use in a given situation. If the languages you know do all you need then learn a new one only if it's to scratch an itch. :-) Best regards, Rich ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
