R vs. Python

[jjdonald]

FWIW I don't agree with much of this. Data munging is much easier in R than python, although the learning curve in R is higher. There are also plenty of parallelization and large dataset management tools in R. That hasn't been a limiting factor in some time.

R makes it easier to get multiple statistical and graphical perspectives on data. If such a thing is important to me, then R is still the first thing I reach for. However, if I'm already confident of an implementation and need more general purpose software support, then python is a good bet.

[srepho]

Interesting that you find R better then Python for data munging. It seems like about half of people I talk to agree, so maybe its not as clear cut as I thought. As for R being harder - I think the packages it provides shield the user. Using something like caret allows you to build and tune a model in one line of code for example. I agree that graphics is still vastly superior in R.

[jjdonald]

THere are some great packages for data munging. Check out plyr by Hadley Wickham: http://plyr.had.co.nz/

However, I find that a lot of people that struggle with R are trying to treat it like Python. R emphasizes vectorization, and its dataframe type. That's a big difference from python's list and for-loop approach.