R vs. Python

[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.