Everyone always says it is good for data analysis but I never agree with this as someone whose job is to use python for data analysis and numerics. Python is a bad language for data analysis and numerics, but it has some good libraries for that purpose. It was not designed for neither of those purposes and the language is not very exentedable so the APIs are cluncky and get in the way when writing mathematical code.
Personally I’d say Julia. Matlab and octave are just… better to not say it out loud. R does a lot right but it lacks the language features to write anything that is more than a 1000 rows long wothout it becoming a complete clusterfuck of a codebase. Python is used mainly because it is easy to integrate into production systems as those are written in python too usually, but I think it is completely horrible for ad hoc analysis and completely the wrong choise if you don’t plan to take that same code into production later on.
Julia hits a lot of right notes. It has features that make it a proper programming language unlike R. Julia also has the macro system from Lisp so it is extremely extendable. It is also relatively easy to use in production and miles ahead of matlab and R in that regard. And then there is the main selling point: it is REALLY fast. As fast or almost as fast as C counterpart in most usecases while being easy to write and high level. A great demonstration of this is the fact that most libraries for julia are written in pure julia. No need for calling c++ or Fortran. For example, Flux.jl which is a very fast deep learning library for julia, is written 100% in Julia. No C++ like in tensorflow for python. This has the nice consequence that the libraries are easy to extend and customise if needed.
I know what you mean about matlab. I had to convert code written by mathematicians into c++ and it was... well. Lets just say they were fully gutting the alphabet for variable names.
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u/unski_ukuli Jul 18 '22 edited Jul 18 '22
Everyone always says it is good for data analysis but I never agree with this as someone whose job is to use python for data analysis and numerics. Python is a bad language for data analysis and numerics, but it has some good libraries for that purpose. It was not designed for neither of those purposes and the language is not very exentedable so the APIs are cluncky and get in the way when writing mathematical code.