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by kyzyl 3626 days ago
This really strongly depends on your industry/focus, and what your end goal is. Some industries are completely dominated (library/community wise) by one or the other. I used to do finance work and strongly preferred python, so I tried hard to use it. (This was also before/right when pandas was out.) I was constantly plagued by needing some fitting routine e.g. for a vector GARCH model, and there was a package in R just sitting there. I was able to get very good mileage out of the RPy2 interface, though.

On the flip side, I've done a fair swath of work in the machine learning arena, and in particular the deep learning topics before it was called 'deep learning', and it was nearly hopeless to use anything except Python or MATLAB (both strongly tied in with C++/CUDA libaries). I think this is still largely the case.

As others have mentioned here, for me the biggest pull away from R was that it's not general purpose. Hard to ship someone R code. Hard to throw a web framework in front of your code. Hard to build a rich desktop GUI on top of it. I know you can do most of those things in R, but last time I dealt with it there was a massive ravine in usability/maturity. I'd also be insincere if I didn't admit that the pervasive R coding style just drove.me.fucking.crazy. That and I found that while there was a mindbogglingly large pile of libraries, documentations was usually very lacking.

/rant

1 comments

One way to get R more production worthy is to use things like PMML to scale up models.