Question

Why are statistical programming languages important to data scientists? What are some advantages and disadvantages the R programming language has over the other main statistical programming languages (i.e. SAS, SQL, Python)?

Answer 1

Statistical tools, and programming languages that provide them, are really useful when you need to represent, model, manipulate & think about large quantities of data and perform operations on very larger chunks of data for business purposes.

They make it easy for us to perform operations on data and faster output. If statistical languages are not there, human can calculate the outcome from the data but this will be not that accurate and also it will take much time and chances of errors will be way more. That's why statistical langauages are used.

Advantages of R:

1. R is free, open-source.

2. R runs anywhere.

3. R supports extensions.

4. R provides an engaged community.

5. R connects with other languages.

Disadvantages of R:

1. Weak Origin.

2. R utilizes more memory than Python.

3. R lacks basic security.

4. R packages and R programming language is much slower than other programming languages like python.