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You shouldn't, necessarily. I use R almost exclusively and I absolutely love it. But people can get a little carried away with picking and recommending the "be

by jme3 14y ago

You shouldn't, necessarily. I use R almost exclusively and I absolutely love it. But people can get a little carried away with picking and recommending the "best" language for particular task. If you feel very comfortable and skilled in Matlab, and you aren't finding that there are regular situations where Matlab can't do what you want, I wouldn't really advocate switching. Same goes for someone working primarily in Python. The biggest reason I would recommend switching away from a language you're already very comfortable in would be the availability of statistical methods that aren't present in your language of choice. Statisticians tend to work in R, so much of the cutting edge work ends up in packages on CRAN. So I wouldn't dump Matlab if you're happy with it, unless you're just looking to learn something new, out of intellectual curiosity, which is always fun.

SIULHT 14y ago
I think your response here and to the other poster above is quite sound. I also program regularly in Matlab, R, and Python, but when it comes to data analysis, I do find that R is just much more concise than the other two (the data manipulation and statistical analysis tools are more high-level). Learning R and going through its tutorials (the MASS book and actually the S-PLUS Statistics Guides) and learning about functions available to me made me learn a lot more about stats. I sometimes use Matlab for image processing and optimization, or some simple simulation but less and less these days (trying to replace it with SciPy since I use Python a lot in my workflow). But I also agree that if you're already proficient with Matlab and happy, then maybe you don't need to learn R (though often you can be blissfully ignorant of your possibilities if you are unaware of the vast libraries that another language/environment offers).

by jme3 14y ago

SIULHT 14y ago

I think your response here and to the other poster above is quite sound. I also program regularly in Matlab, R, and Python, but when it comes to data analysis, I do find that R is just much more concise than the other two (the data manipulation and statistical analysis tools are more high-level). Learning R and going through its tutorials (the MASS book and actually the S-PLUS Statistics Guides) and learning about functions available to me made me learn a lot more about stats. I sometimes use Matlab for image processing and optimization, or some simple simulation but less and less these days (trying to replace it with SciPy since I use Python a lot in my workflow). But I also agree that if you're already proficient with Matlab and happy, then maybe you don't need to learn R (though often you can be blissfully ignorant of your possibilities if you are unaware of the vast libraries that another language/environment offers).