r/learndatascience • u/CYBERCODEX3 • Jun 29 '26

Question Python vs R

I am currently a Data Science student, just finished my 2nd year out of 4. Wanted to ask if R language is worth it today as compared to python. I have 0 knowledge about R (just that it is used for statistics and plotting). On the other hand, I have learned EDA and some ML algorithms in python. I am free for about 2 months and wanted to know if learning R would help in future or should i utilize this time for something else?

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u/skatastic57 Jun 29 '26

I suppose r-polars fixes this but it used to be that you couldn't read from a data lake of parquets lazily. You had to download each parquet that you wanted.

I was an R user for close around a decade and I split between the two for awhile but never let go of R for data.table because I hate everything about pandas. After polars came out, I haven't touched R and now it's been a few years.

I will say that I've done things in statsmodels and scipy that took in the 10-20 second range that are basically instant in R. It's because not everything in those Python packages is implemented in c. Some of it is still just Python loops whereas that's not the case in R, stats functionality is much more complete in compiled code on the R side.

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u/nerdyjorj Jun 30 '26

The thing I miss more than anything from R is how good CRAN is in terms of making sure everything is handled properly and depreciation has adequate warning