Is the statement "R is used more heavily by academics, and Python is used more often by companies" actually true? I am a python programmer in the process of acquiring more data science-centered skills, and was just looking into learning R.
I guess it depends on the branch of science. In physics (my main field), I know much more people knowing/using Python than R. But in psychology, sociology, some branches of statistics - Python is much more rare.
It's incredibly true. Python is usually used more since it's much closer to how the quant. model will look in production anyway. With R, a data scientist / analyst would need to be paired with an engineer who'd actually know how to build the model in production, which takes longer.
It does depend heavily on what industry though. Industries more closely resembling academia, e.g. economic consulting firms, political consulting firms, use R a ton more, but tech companies are dominated by Python. The places within tech companies that still use R again resemble academic environments, so the R&D / statistician group of a tech company may use a lot of R since they're academia transplants.
Totally not true. R is very common in academia (with the exception of physics) and its use in many companies. There are over 1,000 r users at Google, for example.
Thanks for the feedback! How would you introduce R? We've been teaching mostly python now, and want to show people where it would fit into the workflow.
