R Vs Python
Via gael-varoquaux
Hilary is an applied data geek, just what I like! She gave an interesting keynote on how bitly (an URL-shortening startup, for those living under a rock) mines the requests on the URLs that the serve to do things like ranking or phishing attempts detection. Of course, I couldn’t resist asking what tools they used, thinking that she would reply R. She mentioned that they did do some roll-their-own, but she mentioned mlpy and scikit-learn, with a mention that it was very nice, at which point I believe that I blushed. She stressed that R was hard to use and production and raised the point that most often academic software doesn’t pan out in these settings (I hope that I am not distorting her thoughts too much).