On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Florin Iucha wrote: > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:15:40PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > >> It always depends on what your goals are. For aspiring scientists, >> especially those who need to do statistical and/or probabilistic work, >> I recommend learning GNU R. It also makes nice graphs. It is the king >> of the stat packages now and that will continue. > > Matplotlib (a python library) by default produces better-looking graphs > than R. You can of course tweak both, but for quick graphs I prefer the > former. Very interesting. Are there good screenshots somewhere? Is it hard to learn to make graphs in Matplotlib starting from, say, a tab-delimited data file? >> Once they've learned some R, if they want more flexibility for more >> general kinds of programming, I would recommend Python. I'm not using >> it myself, but it seems to be the way to go today. I've talked with a >> lot of people about it and that's where I stand. > > Even if you mostly use R for stats, you still need a good bit of python > to munge the data files - R is nice for importing CSVs, but lots of > manipulations are painful. True, but it depends on the original formt of the data. I usually use perl because I don't know python. R has a lot of import functionality in the base package and in add-ons. Mike