The Long-life Battle Between Python And R

Python vs. R

Hello Data & AI enthusiasts !

There has been a debate or competition between R and Python and generally about which programming language to use for data science and machine learning, the best tool suited for its learners and professionals. 

Some people use Python, others prefer R, and both compete and argue over it. 

The source of this debate is just people trying to figure out the best tools out there to stay on top of their game, also, people trying to get into data science and machine learning wanting to learn the top tools used by professionals in the industry so that they can familiarize themselves with them and eventually get a job that uses them.

This is a very naive and sincere competition, and there have been other similar competitions over which programming language to use, for instance with Data Engineering, Statistics amongst many others.

People are always trying to improve their skills to stay on top of the market, and to stay up to date with industry trends and developments, so it is expected to have similar debates.

This is a very good sign because it means that whatever you are trying to learn or get good at is a topic of high interest to a lot of other people.

Python

Python is a free open source object-oriented programming language. It was created by Guido van Rossum. He started working on it in the late 1980s and it was first released in 1991 as Python 0.9.0.

It has only been about 31 years since Python was created, which is quite insane knowing how famous it has gotten and the amount of magnificent tools it got integrated with, especially all the machine learning tools and libraries that revolutionize the world today : Keras, Tensorflow, Scikit-Learn, Pytorch ...

Popular web development frameworks in Python include Django and Flask. 

Python is used for a variety of tasks, it is a general purpose language, very easy to use and to read, some examples include : Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Task Automation, Software & Web development, Machine Learning, Prototyping and so on.

Python gained its popularity because of its versatility and beginner friendliness according to Coursera

R

R is a free open source programming language created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman in 1993. It is a software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

R also got integrated with cool machine learning and data science libraries. 

For instance, we have Caret, Tidyr, Dplyr, Prophet amongst others.

And for web development, there is Shiny, a tool for building interactive web applications.

R is not a general-purpose programming language like Python and this works to its advantage. It does not compromise by trying to do a lot of things. It does a few things very well according to codecademy.

A lot of people quote and say that R was created by statisticians and for statisticians, and I think this statement is true to some extent. R has a lot of built-in functions for mathematics and statistics for instance.

Whenever I am doing pure statistics in class for example, we are using R, and whenever we are doing any other data work, like clustering or data mining, we are using Python.

But knowing either of these two programming languages will for sure get you or help get you a job in data science and machine learning. 

The important thing is to never stop learning, every extra tool in your arsenal will be a huge bonus to your career. 

Never stop learning. 

Have a wonderful week,

Hind