Opinion of a political science student

[Mst.Rina1R]

Alisa Kozlyakova, 2nd year student of the Political Science program at the HSE.

We have two tracks in our educational program: political analysis and political management. I belong to the second one. We study probability theory and statistics quite intensively. Already from the first year we try to solve some applied problems in R.

The faculty began a trend a few years ago to abandon the use of SPSS and Stata for working with data. This helps to abandon the perception of statistics as a “black box” and conduct research more consciously.

Regarding R, I will say that the entry threshold is not very high, especially due to the ability to execute code line by line. But if you do not study algorithms and statistics in parallel, it will be painful and unclear.

It seems to me that it will be difficult for an unprepared researcher to process raw information in any case, but working with “polished” datasets in R is extremely convenient.

Opinion of the head of IT business
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anton orlov – JMS University
Anton Orlov, CEO of AiSales.

If the choice between R and Python is within the framework of training, then choose the language that most of your circle of friends speaks. If the choice is based on business needs and plans for building a chile telegram career in the field of data analysis, then choose any.

So, we hire based not only on a specific technology stack, but also on how the candidate solves business problems and how quickly he or she is able to master new skills.

The first approach to the problem may be hacky, but a quick and one-time solution will in some cases be preferable to over-optimized and "scientifically" written code. Any programming language is a tool that solves a problem, not the goal itself. Do not forget about it.

Conclusions
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Most respondents agreed that R is a highly specialized language, while Python can be used for more than just social science and humanities data analysis. Both languages ​​are suitable for solving digital humanities problems in most cases. Therefore, we recommend choosing the language that your environment uses.