Pick A Language
Pick a Language⌗
Why do this?⌗
Over the years I’ve been doing data sciencey things I often get asked for advice. I’ve decided to start jotting down my thoughts/opinions on a more regular basis now for several reasons.
- To have an easy place to look for when I inevitably forget whatever I’ve done in the past.
- To allow others to freely have access to whatever experience I’ve accumulated and hopefully give them a head start.
- I like to write and writing is a valuable skill to maintain for anyone. Especially for those trying to share their findings discovered in data to non data folks
With that taken care of, let’s move on to the matter at hand
Where to start?⌗
This is a common question asked by people starting to do, for lack of a better term, what others call “analytics”. The answer I give is learn a programming language. Can you do analytics without learning how to program? Sure, plenty do excellent work using Business Intelligence platforms like Tableau or Power BI. There’s also the workhorse of offices across the world: Microsoft Excel.
Their ease of use (and their non trivially priced licenses), will eventually limit any user wanting to do anything outside the box. They also are severely hampered when it comes to handling datasets that are fairly large. Both of these problems are solved with an Open Source programming language. The first because these programming languages are free, and the second because the lack of a graphical interface like Excel allows one to work with datasets magnitudes of orders larger than what you can fit in a single Excel Workbook.
Which Language?⌗
It doesn’t matter really, just pick one and get started. Sure there are languages that are more tailored to analytics (and used more in the analytics' communities themselves), but really ANY language will do some are just easier to get started than others. Those languages are Python and R (and to a lesser extent Julia). But those aren’t the only ones, there are data science packages in almost every major programming language, even JavaScript!
The more one strays from R and Python, the harder it will be to do things, but it will not be impossible. My language of choice is Python, and I think its better than the others. Those reasons have nothing to do with the other language’s lack of capabilities at getting the job done, and anyone that tries to say otherwise can most likely be ignored. Not sure which one to pick? Flip a coin and off you go.
If you are moving from Excel, this process will be hard and slow. Things you are used to doing in minutes can take hours if you are just starting out. But give it time, eventually you will learn to do things in minutes that would take you hours in Excel!
Once you’ve started⌗
Learning a programming language is not an overnight process unfortunately. The process is often similar to learning a spoken language; nothing can replace the experience of using one. It will take, and I can’t stress this enough, time. That’s it. No fancy math is necessary. Just the ability to invest time on a regular basis to learning the language itself. The payoff though will be well worth the investment.