[babs474]

R and matlab are better, but those tools also have issues integrating into production depending on what you are doing. It's not so much the exact tool you use, but just having a little forethought about how your creation is going to interact with a production system.

A lot of people feel programming is undervalued in academia. For instance Hadley Wickham creator of ggplot2 probably hasn't gotten the recognition he deserves. With a prevailing attitude such as that is it any wonder academic code has such a poor reputation?

Whickham notes that he thinks tides are changing. I agree that it is, as a part of the datascience phenomenon. As part of the change you are going to see a few more macbooks, some cloud servers, maybe a guy with glasses talking about version control and software design. It is not all garbage, I hope you keep an open mind.

Q:Do you feel that the academic culture has caught up with and supports non-traditional academic contributions (e.g. R packages instead of papers)?

A:It’s hard to tell. I think it’s getting better, but it’s still hard to get recognition that software development is an intellectual activity in the same way that developing a new mathematical theorem is.[1]

1. http://simplystatistics.org/2012/05/11/ha/

[carterschonwald]

Integrating in production is a huge biggey. I hope to be spending a lot of my time this summer sharing / educating folks abou some tech I've built to make putting interesting Analytics Into production.