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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