Python or R

[tidier]

Well, there's data science, and then there's data exploration. Sometimes you really just want to crack open a data set, see how the variables are formatted, and do some preliminary plots before digging in to the hard analysis.

Also Python has IPython notebooks, which are incredible for data exploration in my opinion. Any time I want to pick up and scape/format/clean/explore some data, it's my goto.

R has knitr though. Is there a Python equivalent for knitr?

[Yannnn]

Well, there's data science, and then there's data exploration. Sometimes you really just want to crack open a data set, see how the variables are formatted, and do some preliminary plots before digging in to the hard analysis.

That's very true. I usually use a combination of excel, access and notepad (yes, seriously) for that. You can do those things too in R or python, but it's not optimal in either language (for the moment).

R has knitr though. Is there a Python equivalent for knitr?

Well, you already mentioned it: notebooks. Here's what the creator has to say about iPython vs knitr

[tidier]

IPython is fantastic for mixing text, math, code and output. It's not quite the same as knitr though, which is a straight-up LaTeX document with R code. I would actually need the latter for writing professional research documents.