I think I might be done with R. Why, you may ask? I think the answer to that is:
"Practical application." or just building cool stuff.
Now that might be a kind of contentious thing to say, but just from everything that I'd read and seen so far, it makes so much sense! For the purposes of my thesis, or anytime I needed to just analyse a dataset, R does the job. It's easy to work with, easily extensible, writing commands are a breeze, and it's just a good statistical analytics tool to get shit done.
But I always felt like something was missing. Sure R has it's own language, and yes, I guess by some strech of the imagination, one can call it programming, but coming from a background of Java, C++ and the like, it just never felt like real programming. Sure, there's ggplot2, and shiny, and yes, you can make functions and you can tune parameters; but it just doesn't feel the same. It doesn't feel like real programming.
To be honest, I don't know python that well, and not knowing it in this day and age is honestly pretty nuts. But everything I hear about it seems like learning the language is a breeze. No semicolons you way? No memory management? No mallacs required? Interesting. I think a friend put it best:
"If coding in C is like stick shift, Python is like driving in automatic"
Works for me.
