Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by iaw 2017 days ago
I know R because that's what we used at my first company. I would love to switch to Python/Pandas but I'm comfortable with R and it does everything I need it to with one exception over ten years of heavy use.

Python is wonderful but the cognitive load for switching in industry and academia without a clear cost benefit isn't worth it to most people I know in my shoes. I encourage new coders to learn Python but discounting R feels a bit asinine.

Hadley is still actively doing work for R which has led to a graphing packages that is substantially better than anything in Python (last I check). I have no doubt that Python will steal it and implement it eventually (as they should) but R is still doing firsts that Python hasn't (note the native implementation of Piping, they're late to the party on lambda functions obviously)

2 comments

I made the switch years ago and there is lots that python does better. I really, really wish for a perfect port of dplyr and ggplot2. Those are what I truly miss, everything else I'm pretty happy with.
plotnine isn't a perfect port of ggplot2, but it's pretty close. https://plotnine.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
It will never happen. Python doesn't trust programmers with the power to make packages like dplyr and ggplot
R already has a better lambda than Python, simply by virtue of having first class functions. This is just a bit shorter notation for something that already existed.