Why I use Python

What is Python

Python is an interpreted high-level programming language for general-purpose programming. Created by Guido van Rossum and first released in 1991, Python has a design philosophy that emphasizes code readability, notably using significant whitespace. It provides constructs that enable clear programming on both small and large scales.

Python features a dynamic type system and automatic memory management. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including object-oriented, imperative, functional and procedural, and has a large and comprehensive standard library.

Python interpreters are available for many operating systems. CPython, the reference implementation of Python, is open source software and has a community-based development model, as do nearly all of its variant implementations. CPython is managed by the non-profit Python Software Foundation.

Python in Data

Python is expanding it's data analytics tool kit rapidly and the new libraries place a larger emphasis on performance than is typical in an R library. In my opinion, Python became worth learning when the panda's library implemented data frames. In the near future, a lot of common analytical tools will be just as easy to implement in Python, while also faster and better able to handle very large datasets. When it comes to really big-scale data, R does not have the chops; Python is more likely to take you there.

Python is a fully featured programming language, which means it can be used to create real software. R tends to be used for one-off, basic research analysis. It doesn't offer more than minor features for interfacing with the OS, scraping the web, and other important programming tasks. You can always interface python to R for the analytics piece, but in practice this is not a common way to build software. It is usually better to have the data analysis done native in Python.

This also means that Python is the more marketable skill set in the tech world. In general, I find that those with a CS-like background are more likely to understand Python than R.

By the way, I will rewrite this repo IN R as soon as I am available !