Choosing Between R and Python

Mst.Rina1R · Post by **Mst.Rina1R** » Tue Jan 07, 2025 5:32 am

But there is another worthy contender for solving these problems. Python is more popular and widespread in data analysis, and there are more courses and literature in Russian on Python than on R. Is the choice between them determined by the needs of modern humanities research or is it a matter of taste?

I think it's a matter of taste and partly fashion. For some reason, R has become very widespread in the social sciences abroad and partly in Russia. Although this is not true for all sciences: linguists, for example, overwhelmingly prefer Python. At least because of the more developed NLP apparatus, but I believe not only.

No matter how well a humanities scholar knows R, it is still not his or her main professional skill. Can you outline the necessary minimum of R programming skills that will be sufficient for application in humanities research? How much time might it take to reach this level?

The minimum is none at all, most science is still done cyprus telegram in ready-made packages. But if you at least know how to prepare data in R, you will already have a serious advantage: in flexibility, in the speed of making changes, in the transparency of the process. Example: many times I encountered the situation where people forgot what exactly they did in Excel before analyzing the data in SPSS, and they had to strain to remember or start over.

Where to start learning R
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What advice would you give to a young researcher who decides to learn R? What should they pay special attention to, what questions should they devote time to?

Loops are simpler, but the apply family is a very important story in R, do not neglect it. Once you get the hang of the basic syntax, try to get into data.table or dplyr - you will almost certainly have to work with one or the other, and it is better to stop being afraid of them right away. It is best to do the full processing cycle in R right away: from raw data to finished reports. This will require pulling up RMarkdown, but believe me, you will not regret it.