Re:The Incredible Growth of Python
by roystonvassey on Thursday September 07, 2017 @04:29AM
(#15189989)
The problem is that data science, often, isn't just data science. It might involve doing a bunch of activities that are strictly not data science - scraping data off the web (Python has requests), visualization for some understanding (Python has dozens of nifty libraries), store data in a small db (Python works nicely with sqllite, among others), convert all of this into an app (Python has Flask, again among others).
R's data frame concept was fantastic for those transitioning from 'spreadsheet' analysis but with Pandas, Python has improved and enhanced this concept even further.
This is just one example but I think it is this versatility that makes it more attractive than R or Julia.
Re:The Incredible Growth of Python
by vanderZwan on Thursday September 07, 2017 @04:54AM
(#15190083)
Yes, in principle Julia should be able to do all of these things too, but it simply doesn't have the decades-old history of libraries to stand on yet.
Yeah I love Julia but it's hard to argue with Python's data science stack. Sometimes it's almost to easy to get things done.
Julia is really fast but the DataFrames/DataTables package was kind of slow and feature-incomplete. Because Pandas is so optimized, Julia wasn't winning out over Python on the speed side of things, and was definitely losing on the ergonimics, so for data science it wasn't the best choice (unlike say numerical simulation).
I'm sure this will change if it hasn't already, especially with the better parallelization that Julia is capable of.
Apart from that, if one is just getting started out in data science and has never really handled a programming language before, Julia is very nice really. And their documentation is pretty damn awesome. And once you get past the performance recommendations I think it gets pretty fast (?). I'm out of my depth beyond a certain point since I've only ever experimented with it.