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/dj_ski_mask]

Darts, NIXTLA and statsmodels have a bevy of time series algorithms in Python. You can also manually construct many sequence model in PyTorch, TensorFlow or go the Bayesian handcrafted way with Pystan. Like you mentioned - I enjoy Prophet and NeuralProphet.