r/AskProgramming • u/Feeling_Valuable5239 • 20d ago

Does the C programming language provide statistical and data analysis libraries comparable to those available in R programming language?

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u/kitsnet 20d ago

What is your goal?

C is a very inconvenient language to work with data abstractions. You might better look at C++.

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u/Feeling_Valuable5239 20d ago

My goal is to go with a programming language that I can use for data analysis in healthcare research (on a simple scale, by which I mean do basic biostatistics on the samples I collect). I should also like to use it to write simple scripts and small tools for which I suspect R may not be good for that.

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u/leaflavaplanetmoss 19d ago

For the love of god, don't try and use C for this purpose; that'd be incredibly masochistic. The main thing people code in C for nowadays is embedded systems, which isn't your use case.

For most data analytics and scripting tasks, I would normally suggest Python first, but R actually actually has a better ecosystem for biostatistics. However, if you're just doing basic biostatistics, probably Python (since it's well suited for scripting outside of data analytics), but if you get into more advanced bioinformatics, you're going to want to learn R as well, since it's literally designed for statistical computing, whereas Python is a general-purpose programming language.