Member-only story
Swift was poised to replace Python. Then it tanked
Why Swift was too ambitious too early, and how this is impacting its future
In the world of data science and machine learning, there is no one language that rules them all. There’s Matlab, one of the favorites for people who have a heavy maths background. There’s R, which is open-source and somewhat hackable. And there’s Julia, a powerful newcomer to the landscape which is getting a lot of traction these days.
But there is one language that almost no data scientist can go without. You guessed it — Python is the closest we have to a language that rules them all.
Python is one of the easiest languages that you can possibly learn.
And it’s kind of sticky. Once you’ve learned Python, you might want to do everything the Python way.
Compare that to C. Without a doubt, it is an amazing language. But you’ll be quite happy to let go of manually having to manage the computer memory for your variables as soon as you’re able to.
Sure, things like memory management are important in low-level programming, for basic functioning and for execution speed. But this is not what programmers enjoy spending lots of time on.
