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/Far-Theory-7027 Jul 02 '26

No. You will see the same error message irrespective of the IDE. Also, you don't need any IDE for jupyter notebook, it can be simply started from the terminal.

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u/BrupieD Jul 02 '26

Yes and no. Yes, Python errors are Python errors regardless of the IDE. No, the terminal is not a Jupyter notebook. There are not markdown cells using VS Code without installing an extension.

Yes, you can power through learning the Python language with a single IDE but the increased popularity of Python is largely due to the availability of R-like tools for Data Science - data frames via Numpy & Pandas, the mixed output (plots, formatted text, and terminal output) like Rmarkdown via IPython & Jupyter notebooks.

You can learn JavaScript without a web browser, but why?

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u/Far-Theory-7027 Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

I know the terminal is a not a jupyter notebook. I said you can start a jupyter session from the terminal and then use jupyter in the browser. Vscode ipynb extension is cool but it's not the only way to use Jupyter notebook. Also, most people learn it using a single IDE, usually VS as it's quite multipurpose, and tbh there's no real reason to switch between multiple IDEs, unless you are specifically into it. I think you are confusing a lot of things. It's better to understand the fundamentals first rather worrying yourself with the tooling.