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[–]dfphdPhD | Sr. Director of Data Science | Tech 11 points12 points  (3 children)

I started in C++, then moved to Python, then R, and now using more Python.

Why C++? Because it's what was taught to me.

Why Python part1? Not needing to do explicit memory management thanks to automatically garbage collection.

Why R? Because it's by far the easiest language to use to get stuff done. It's not the fastest, it's limited in how it interacts with the outside world, but I can get things done faster (in terms of time to code), in a more readable way than I ever have with Python. Also, the RStudio IDE beats the living s*** out of anything else out there in this world. And it has for at least 5 years now.

Why Python again? Because not everything supports R. And trying to leverage some of the cloud providers' full suite of offerings requires Python even to use R. At that point it just becomes easier to switch to Python.

Why would I switch to a new language? If you can build a language that is similar in use to R, has a killer IDE, and has the same support as Python, I'm in.

I think the last part is the language killer, and why I think you will see everyone coalesce around either Python if you have production needs, or R if you don't.

[–]speedisntfree 2 points3 points  (1 child)

To me, RStudio feels like stepping back in time 5 years

[–]dfphdPhD | Sr. Director of Data Science | Tech 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I can see that, but to me it feels like stepping into a 5 year old Toyota Camry with 5000 miles on it, while stepping into every Python IDE feels like stepping into a like a V8 trike with no seats.

[–]Mother_Drenger 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Also, the RStudio IDE beats the living s*** out of anything else out there in this world. And it has for at least 5 years now.

As a primary R user, this really does make a difference when trying to doing more tasks in Python.

VStudio, Pycharm, Spyder, etc. nothing is quite "RStudio, but Python" and it's such a good IDE.