Most of the really rad tools out there use polyglot stacks, anyway.
There is no reason why you can't run a bash script that runs a python script (or some weird ancient legacy tool) to run some analysis that pipes a final CSV into an R script's dataframe for plotting using the prettyness of ggplot. Programming Languages are for people. ________________________________ From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of E.W. <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 2:51 PM To: Matthew Gidden Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Discuss] Any tips for learning R and Python? If I am recalling things correctly, and this will certainly be contentious for some folk, but Python is a general purpose programming language while R is a statistical programming language. I think it is generally the case that with enough hacking you can accomplish nearly any task with any tool, but some tools are more geared towards performing certain tasks. I like to stress to brand new students that the question is never "can" but "should" or "which is easier?" when it comes to this kind of thing. Sometimes even a brutal hack is more efficient or mentally easier to accomplish than fighting to learn something in a new language that you aren't comfortable with. "I know this could be better R, but I need to get the job done. [translation: please don't judge my for loops]" is a completely sane and normal reaction. Programming communities or those offering consultations shouldn't turn into handwriting judges. This doesn't mean we should reject or toss away the importance of language idioms, but turn our attention to respecting that it's the research content that matters and not which plotting library or whatever else they used. I think that SWC does a great job of this balance and showing it in action. I don't believe there is a clear line to be drawn between Python and R, except in the cases when a specific package is needed and does not exist for that other language. The choice between Python or R is never *just* about the task, but also about the skills, experiences, and support networks of the person who will be writing the code for that task. Elizabeth
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