Hacker News Reader

Comment by devty | Hacker News Reader

Could you provide an example in stat analysis where python is clearly inferior? In the article, R seems to have an advantage of having many useful stat functions baked in vs having to import specific modules in python. im wondering if your proficiency in R is being weighed in your evaluation of R - maybe python's statistical analysis tool has many to offer, but you are more aware of R's toolsets.

View on HN

I'm primarily a Python user and can say that there's no contest that R has many packages that Python does not have an equivalent of yet. This includes stats stuff and especially finance/trading. Definitely not a showstopper for me but if I were to recommend one or the other to people at work with no programming skills, I would have to choose R for the breadth of existing packages.

thank you for your reply

>>but if I were to recommend one or the other to people at work with no programming skills, I would have to choose R for the breadth of existing packages.

My 2 cents: If someone has no programming background, then building a foundation from python will allow them to do much much more than building a foundation on R--unless of course they only care about statistical analysis and have no inclination to code more generally. I learned both at the same time even though I had no use for Python at the time (was and still am a professor) but I use it almost everyday now and very much enjoy it!

Agree completely. Should have qualified that with most at my spot/industry(finance) would be using it as an Excel replacement and just want to get things done; hence the value of existing packages.

Also, ML academics tend towards R for reference implementations of novel algorithms. They are often available in R first. This cuts both ways; sometimes the Python implementation that comes later misses some subtleties of the R implementation that the original authors nailed, and other times the R implementation is a proof of concept, while a later implementation is more real-world ready. But the latest and greatest tends to be available in R long before it has made its way into e.g. SciPy.

I can't easily do GAMs or SEM in Python.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com