R or Python?

[Tom]

In the short term, R will give you some easy to use tools you can play with in your first day/week of learning. Python is very different, and can do much more, but it will take some time to learn various functions and useful tools.

I’d say learn both at the same time, but you’ll probably take to R much quicker.


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[kevinykuo]

I'm biased af, but if you're in insurance and want to pick up a language, R is the way to go. The latest applied actuarial research is pretty much all done in R*, and R has great tooling for general business analysis tasks with shiny/tidyverse/tidymodels.

* E.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=3288454, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....act_id=3270877, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.09253

[Maphisto's Sidekick]

Originally Posted by Enough Exams Already

That may be because the IT department has nowhere to turn for support issues on freeware/open source software; safety may be the excuse rather than the reason. With proprietary software they can punt issues to the vendor's support department.

This is where Microsoft having an implementation of R, and having its own alternative repository to CRAN (MRAN) can be useful.

[Colonel Smoothie]

Originally Posted by Marcie

I think it's fairly common, whether or not it's reasonable, for IT departments to be wary of freeware/open source software. I think it took us years to convince our IT folks that R, Python, and other programs are safe.

Can you do some explaining to me? How can IT people, presumably people with more tech education than people like you and me, not know this. When people with less tech education, like you and me, know this? Especially with Python which is a language that every person who has taken a programming course knows about.

[llcooljabe]

tech education <> programming, I don't think. Or am i missing your point?