On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:15:40PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
> It always depends on what your goals are.  For aspiring scientists, 
> especially those who need to do statistical and/or probabilistic work, I 
> recommend learning GNU R.  It also makes nice graphs.  It is the king of 
> the stat packages now and that will continue.

Matplotlib (a python library) by default produces better-looking graphs
than R.  You can of course tweak both, but for quick graphs I prefer
the former.

> Once they've learned some R, if they want more flexibility for more 
> general kinds of programming, I would recommend Python.  I'm not using it 
> myself, but it seems to be the way to go today.  I've talked with a lot of 
> people about it and that's where I stand.

Even if you mostly use R for stats, you still need a good bit of
python to munge the data files - R is nice for importing CSVs, but
lots of manipulations are painful.

Cheers,
florin

-- 
Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition.
      http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163
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