This article summarizes a trend in programming languages usage, based on a number of proxy metrics. This change started to be more pronounced in early 2017: Python became the language of choice, over R, for data science and machine learning applications.
Some statistics
We have 83 fresh, active job ads, relevant to data science and mostly in US and London, for Python: you can check them out here. For R, we have 66, and you can check them out here. It would be interesting to compare these stats with job number stats from LinkedIn.
Another metric of interest is the number of articles written about each language, in the context of data science. On Data Science Central, we have 19,500 documents where R is mentioned (since 2008) versus 11,500 with Python. However, when you click on these two links to check out the top results, 9 out of 10 are in 2017 for Python, versus 7 out of 10 for R. In short, R is starting to show its age. A Google search for R or Python (on Data Science Central) will yield similar conclusions.
It would be interesting to check what is happening with Java and C++, as they have been the workhorses of software development for a long time.
To read the full article and discover what happened, click here.
