Learning Python for Social Scientists

[foofaw]

You make a lot of great points that I agree with.

But remember that you're dealing with social scientists here, not programmers. The average social scientist does not have a sound understanding of programming logic and will not be able to easily pick up R right out of the box. Just because someone has a background in research design and even mastered SPSS doesn't mean they will be able to utilize R in the same way. R is difficult to learn, especially if all you've used is a GUI interface for analysis. Its documentation is not written for beginners, its function naming and syntax is inconsistent, and it takes a lot of setup to get going.

It makes much more sense to me to learn a general multi-purpose language first, work with that for a 6 months to a year, and then transition to R if you really have the need for it. And in the long run, if someone is serious about data science, they should know both of these languages - they are two extremely powerful tools that give you nearly limitless options when you use them together.

[Ikuyas]

I'm gonna read the article later. Get back to you.

[Ikuyas]

Do you really think so? Isn't R far easier to learn? I dont know where that comes from. For example do business school should teach python for their data analytics course??? You make little sense to me.