How Python became the language of choice for data science

Re:How Python became the language of choice for data science by drunkpotato on Friday November 22, 2013 @07:08AM (#6780331)

Matlab leaves something to be desired for general programming tasks. If you can, it's sometimes nice to define stages and pipe between them. I love Python for text processing and XML, but I find Matlab way easier for shoving matrices around. I liked using the strengths of both by pre-processing raw text and XML files through a Python script, spitting out a CSV or tab-delimited file, and slurping that up in Matlab.

Matlab has come a long way though. Coming from a functional programming background, I was delighted to find that you can pass functions as arguments to some matrix operators and get some very terse map+reduce operations.

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Re:How Python became the language of choice for data science by dagw on Friday November 22, 2013 @07:23AM (#6780375)

There's Oct2py and mlabwrap which lets you call octave and matlab functions from python. I've used Oct2py a few times just like you describe and it worked fine. Read, parse and format my data in python, passing it to some matlab functions (which happend to work in octave) and then formatting and writing the results back in python.

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