@Owlbert which one is easiest for beginners/ most needed in a professional environment

@PoliticalVoyeur Python has a ton more resources online and for free. Good place to start. Maybe hold off on R for now.

@PoliticalVoyeur @Owlbert this is entirely contingent on the type of data analysis you're doing, what the rest of the group uses, that sort of thing. Basically, if you're working with a lot of statisticians and using more "statistical" methods, #R is going to be the right idea. If you're working with ML types, Python might be better.

@gzthompson @PoliticalVoyeur Thank you! I appreciate the clarification. :smiley:

@gzthompson @PoliticalVoyeur @Owlbert Adding a bit: if you're a beginner, I suggest you start with #Python

@red @PoliticalVoyeur @Owlbert I would also note that, if what you're doing is taking already cleaned data, maybereshaping it, and dumping it into a model, your "coding skills" don't need to be *that* great. But in that case you need to be heavy on statistics knowledge. However if you don't know the theory...

@Owlbert @gzthompson
Let's say, hypothetically, I am using data sets based off of demographic information of voter roles. "R" or "Python" would you think?

@PoliticalVoyeur I don't know what you're planning on doing to the data. So generic advice is Python because it's easy to learn how to do what you want, unless I know what you're doing with the data can just be dropped into R or some R package easily and it will spit out what you want.

@PoliticalVoyeur The great strength of R is that there are a lot of packages that "do what you want" if you know what you're doing. The great weakness of R is that it's a quirky language, can be very slow, and was designed to specifically work for statistics.

@PoliticalVoyeur @gzthompson Nice infographic might help: https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/r-or-python-for-data-analysis#gs.jkDAim8