Why Python is a Boon for Programmers

What is common between companies like Quora, YouTube, Google, and Journyx? All of these companies are data driven, they rely a lot on the use of Machine Learning and, most importantly, all of these companies use Python extensively.

People often ask this question – “I am a programmer and want to get into data science. What should I do? Should I learn R? Should I learn Python?” In this post, I will try to answer these questions.
If you are a programmer and are trying to get into data science, learning Python will be a good decision.

Here is why?

1. Python is similar to many programming languages that people generally know about: Python is very similar to JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP in many respects. Most programmers have a working knowledge of these programming languages and this makes it easier for programmers to learn Python. The basic features of these languages such as the use of arrays, anonymous functions etc., are also present in Python.

2. Python has very good machine learning libraries: The variety of machine learning libraries that are available in Python is large. One can choose between Scikitlearn, Keras, Theano and Tensorflow. Many neural network libraries such as Keras, Theano etc., are exclusively available in Python. So, if you want to do cutting edge machine learning work, you must know Python.

3. Python excels at handling text data: Unlike statistical software environments such as R, Python excels at handling text data. People who know Python can easily mine text corpus for useful insights. Python also provides support for Natural Language Processing through NLTK and sPacy