faq: Is R used extensively today in data science?

faq/README.md

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 - [What is Euclidean distance in terms of machine learning?](./euclidean-distance.md)
 - [When should one use median, as opposed to the mean or average?](./median-vs-mean.md)
 
+##### Programming Languages for Data Science and ML
+
+- [Is R used extensively today in data science?](./r-in-datascience.md)
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faq/r-in-datascience.md

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+# Is R used extensively today in data science?
+
+"Extensively" is a relative term, so let me discuss this in comparison to other languages.
+I would say that R was probably THE language for doing statistics or "data science" work about 5-10 years ago. Today, as the Python sci-stack caught up and keeps growing, it's about as widely used as Python for similar tasks. I can see a shift more towards Python in future though because there seems to be more development going on at the moment towards scalability and computational efficiency. For example,
+
+- Blaze for out-of-core analysis of big datasets
+- Dask for parallel computing on multi-core machines or on a distributed clusters
+- Theano and Tensorflow for the optimization and evaluation of mathematical
+
+expressions involving multi-dimensional arrays utilizing GPUs
+and many, many more. Although R is fine for "small scale" analyses, performance can be (become) a big weakness of R for real-world applications.
+However, keep in mind that Scala is also big on the rise right now, take Spark for instance.
+Eventually, I think it all depends on the task and the problem you'd want to solve. For "smallish" analysis and projects, Python's default sci-stack and R work just fine. For large-scale distributed computing, you'd typically use Spark (written in Scala). For deep learning, you use Theano or Tensorflow (via Python) or Torch (written in Lua).
+
+(If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail :).)