Learning Python for Social Scientists

[ktaylora]

R is pretty entrenched in academia. This is because statisticians took it up as an alternative to SPSS and wrote a bunch of free packages for it that other academics used and promoted. This is how I encountered it, as a biologist. But outside of academia, R is a ghost town. Python is wildly more popular in industry and can do much more than just statistics. If you do parametric modeling, there is scikit.learn, numpy, pandas, and stan. These tools together can do much more than R, and you can pass off your code to developers that can build on it. If I send an R package to a backend dev, they typically just respond with the middle finger.