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R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

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Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#21

Post by halflings »

R_haterade wrote: post #7
jl6 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAS is also a huge iceberg, without much in the way of open source culture that lends itself to visibility. A lot of SAS happens behind closed doors at megacorps.

Also notable that so many new shops are foregoing it entirely. SAS, and its price tag, is a holdover from the days when 'analytics' was an afterthought for companies looking to maximize profit. Now that much less mature companies are realizing the value of 'analytics' (I hate that word) SAS's cost doesn't really make sense.

What word do you prefer to 'analytics', if we are talking about taking data and analysing it to extract insights?

This does not have to involve machine learning, and "pattern recognition" is an academic term (and might be confusing for laymen).

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#22

Post by dredmorbius »

cwyers wrote: post #6

I hate these sort of comparisons. You've got R, Python, SAS... okay, those are sort of similar. Then you've got Java and "C, C++ or C#," and man, including C# with C/C++ is... fraught. Then you've got Hadoop, Spark, Hive... okay, those are all kind of different from what we've had so far. Now you've got Tableu and RapidMiner. Uh. In the second chart, "Microsoft" is included as a keyword. Okay. It's just... comparing…

"Microsoft was a difficult search since it appears in data science ads that mention other Microsoft products such as Windows or SQL Server. To eliminate such over-counting, I treated Microsoft different from the rest by including product names such as Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit. So there’s a good chance I went from over-emphasizing Microsoft to under-emphasizing it with only 157 jobs."

Read the methodology, Luke.

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#23

Post by cwyers »

dredmorbius wrote: post #22
cwyers wrote: post #6

I hate these sort of comparisons. You've got R, Python, SAS... okay, those are sort of similar. Then you've got Java and "C, C++ or C#," and man, including C# with C/C++ is... fraught. Then you've got Hadoop, Spark, Hive... okay, those are all kind of different from what we've had so far. Now you've got Tableu and RapidMiner. Uh. In the second chart, "Microsoft" is included as a keyword. Okay. It's just... comparing…

"Microsoft was a difficult search since it appears in data science ads that mention other Microsoft products such as Windows or SQL Server. To eliminate such over-counting, I treated Microsoft different from the rest by including product names such as Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit. So there’s a good chance I went from over-emphasizing Microsoft to under-emphasizing it with only 157 jobs." Rea…

Okay, but what does that mean? Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit is like Tensorflow, which is included as an item on the list. Azure Machine Learning is something you can script with R or Python, and allows you to create APIs for predictive use on Azure. What good does lumping those together do? And what does it tell us that some things that are basically an R/Python library are less popular than R or Python themselves? It's this weird, uneven mix of things. Some are programming languages, some are libraries or frameworks, some are end-user products like Tableau.

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#24

Post by CloudYeller »

rm999 wrote: post #9

I'm glad to see the quick convergence on Python. I've evaluated Python every ~2 years since 2006 for "data science" tasks (machine learning, statistics, data munging, and visualization). I'd argue that Python only properly covered this full data science stack 1.5-2 years ago. R covered this stack adequately probably around 2011-2012. Matlab had this before 2005. What makes Python a superior language to Matlab and R i…

Another reason why I'm glad python is winning (and a fun read):

http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#25

Post by R_haterade »

halflings wrote: post #21
R_haterade wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also notable that so many new shops are foregoing it entirely. SAS, and its price tag, is a holdover from the days when 'analytics' was an afterthought for companies looking to maximize profit. Now that much less mature companies are realizing the value of 'analytics' (I hate that word) SAS's cost doesn't really make sense.

What word do you prefer to 'analytics', if we are talking about taking data and analysing it to extract insights? This does not have to involve machine learning, and "pattern recognition" is an academic term (and might be confusing for laymen).

Definitely agreed. But the word analytics means too many different things to too many different people at this point. I'm in favor of more words to differentiate each part.

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#26

Post by [deleted] »

halflings wrote: post #21
R_haterade wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also notable that so many new shops are foregoing it entirely. SAS, and its price tag, is a holdover from the days when 'analytics' was an afterthought for companies looking to maximize profit. Now that much less mature companies are realizing the value of 'analytics' (I hate that word) SAS's cost doesn't really make sense.

What word do you prefer to 'analytics', if we are talking about taking data and analysing it to extract insights? This does not have to involve machine learning, and "pattern recognition" is an academic term (and might be confusing for laymen).

[deleted]

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#27

Post by rm999 »

fnord123 wrote: post #13
rm999 wrote: post #9

I'm glad to see the quick convergence on Python. I've evaluated Python every ~2 years since 2006 for "data science" tasks (machine learning, statistics, data munging, and visualization). I'd argue that Python only properly covered this full data science stack 1.5-2 years ago. R covered this stack adequately probably around 2011-2012. Matlab had this before 2005. What makes Python a superior language to Matlab and R i…

If you work in a team mixing data engineers and data scientists then python has been a superior choice for a decade as the different team members are all using the same language to build the platform and to use it. We've had a lot of success weaning people of R and MATLAB in finance (so replace "data scientist" with "quant"). Of course if you work in a field that doesn't have the libraries and can't build them in hou…

This is a great point. Python has been a solid data engineer/pipeline language for years now. It makes it easy for data scientists and data engineers (or people who wear both hats) to work in the same environment and codebase.

Re: R Passes SAS, but Python Leaves Them Both Behind

#28

Post by shanusmagnus »

CloudYeller wrote: post #24
rm999 wrote: post #9

I'm glad to see the quick convergence on Python. I've evaluated Python every ~2 years since 2006 for "data science" tasks (machine learning, statistics, data munging, and visualization). I'd argue that Python only properly covered this full data science stack 1.5-2 years ago. R covered this stack adequately probably around 2011-2012. Matlab had this before 2005. What makes Python a superior language to Matlab and R i…

Another reason why I'm glad python is winning (and a fun read): http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/

Love!

"R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers."

Yup.

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