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TheTrueRepublican

Council Member
I like how forgiving Python is about “duck typing” and it has good standard libraries for statistics and data visualization. I would definitely use it for data extraction and predictive modeling stuff. But MATLAB just seems a little cleaner and less susceptible to introducing subtle unseen errors. If I’m just coding a number-crunching algorithm I think MATLAB would be my preference. For data analysis that doesn’t involve numerical analysis R is really good because it is made for that. You can get good visualizations with R too but the core language isn’t great for that. What I like about Python is how well you can integrate PANDAS data frames and (again) the standard libraries which is why I would be more likely to use it for a long-term project when I might use R or MATLAB for a one-off that doesn’t involve a lot of collaboration.
Of course, it all depends on your type of work.

I tend to solve Leetcode better using Python for interviews and such.

But for work we are hardcore Golang for most of our projects.
 

middleview

President
Supporting Member
And to think.... it’s been only what? 30 years?

Today I’m able to code by the pool using an online IDE through the cloud on my a tablet.

Developing in those days must have been a beast!
Back when most data processing was done be EAM machines and cards were moved from machine to machine to accomplish a report...yes it was absolutely the stone age. Want to sort the data? Oh, gotta use a card sorter. Now you have an inventory deck sorted by part number. Want to find out the current inventory, sort the cards from orders filled and then merge the two decks together by card number and hope that the part number is in the same card column...otherwise your gotta use those wires to merge dissimilar cards...then run it through a 407 to do reports subtracting orders from inventory and then have it punch a new deck of cards!!!!

AND it was all then managed on a tape based Univac 1500 because disk drives were too fragile to have on a ship at sea.

The monitors were a hoot...big round screens, about 16" across. How about a 500K disk drive that was as big as two refrigerators, side by side. Motor for heads on one side and the disk itself on the other.

Burroughs had a thing for mass storage that was fondly referred to as a hay baler. Giant cards, probably 6ft long and 4ft wide, that were stacked and read by the machine itself. They came along just as IBM came out with the first disk drive and died an ugly death after Burroughs made a few of them...I only saw it on the loading dock on it's way back to the manufacturer...I think the effort to install it failed before they ever made it operational.

If you ever saw one you'd know why that company went under.
 
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