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Programming language for data science / machine learning

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Brief Description:: Data Science is one of the fastest-growing industries with an enormous number of tools to satiate your needs. Let’s talk about the different data science languages and determine how to choose the best language

Raise your hands if you’ve ever asked this question or have answered it before. I’m fairly certain all of you will have come across this eternal dilemma about choosing the “perfect” programming language to start your data science career.

Here’s the thing – there is no one size fits all approach here. There is no so called “perfect” language for data science. Each language has its own unique features and capabilities that make it work for certain data science professionals.

And the choice isn’t limited to Python, R and SAS! We are living in the midst of a golden period in programming languages as we’ll see in this article.

Python

Python is a general-purpose, high-level interpreted language that has been growing rapidly in the applications of data science, web development, rapid application development. Its ease of use and learning has certainly made it very easy to adapt for beginners.

Python has efficient high-level data structures and effective execution of object-oriented programming. It has a comprehensive base library along with a large number of libraries for data science making it one of the strongest competitors.

R

R consists of a considerable number of statistical functions and libraries for linear and non-linear modelling, time-series modelling, clustering, classification, and much more. What sets R apart from general purpose data science languages? It consists of high-quality plots which will surely help you in your analysis.

SAS

SAS stands for Statistical Analytical System. It is a tool developed for advanced analytics and complex statistical operations. It is used by large scale organizations and professionals due to its high reliability. SAS performs statistical modelling through base SAS which is the main programming language that runs the SAS environment. It is a closed-source proprietary tool that offers a wide variety of statistical capabilities to perform complex modelling.