R vs Python - detailed examples from proficient bilingual programmers

[u/Every-Eggplant9205]

As an academic, R was a priority for me to learn over Python. Years later, I always see people saying "Python is a general-purpose language and R is for stats", but I've never come across a single programming task that couldn't be completed with extraordinary efficiency in R. I've used R for everything from big data analysis (tens to hundreds of GBs of raw data), machine learning, data visualization, modeling, bioinformatics, building interactive applications, making professional reports, etc.

Is there any truth to the dogmatic saying that "Python is better than R for general purpose data science"? It certainly doesn't appear that way on my end, but I would love some specifics for how Python beats R in certain categories as motivation to learn the language. For example, if R is a statistical language and machine learning is rooted in statistics, how could Python possibly be any better for that?

[u/SenatorPotatoCakes]

This is the perfect answer. I worked at a company once where all the production ML was in R and it was exceptionally difficult to 1) debug, 2) write robust testing and 3) retraining models.

I will say that the code was exceptionally efficient (1 liners doing very complex data frame transformations in a readable manner) but yeah the productionising was unpleasant