I've found Python + Pandas much better in this regard than R. Maybe it's just me, but for grouping, indexing, and manipulating tabular data, Python syntax just makes more sense.
That said, R is better for stats and matrix operations.
They might have borrowed from R.
Wes McKinney admits to being influenced by R especialy data frames...but it makes data analysis all the more easier when i can do everything i want within the the Python environment.
pandas is proving to be a bit of a longer learning curve i must admit, but then the python environment and native Matplotlib support made life oh so much simpler.
The split-apply-combine framework dealing with group by tasks (http://www.jstatsoft.org/v40/i01/paper, not that there aren't other precedents) for one. But generally, Wes has used R to figure out what people want to do, and then ported an elegant interface to python.
Can you elaborate on data.table being 'a game changer'. I am inclined to agree, but I'm am just starting to get a handle on it. I am still hesitant and switching between sqldf, reshape2, base::merge and data.table more than I would like. Do you think it could become a dominant method for data preparation?
Python has PyTables which complements Pandas nicely and seems to offer the same sort of features as data.table (note, I've not actually used data.table)
I am using R to analyse and document (knitr and latex) epidemiologic data which does not involve parsing a lot of text to extract my analysis data set. Data preparation for this type of research involves more combining data from different source tables, restructuring repeated measures, etc. I only know how to do that using R. Can Python be incorporated into the knitr literate programming framework and is it worth learning another language?
My perspective is that life circumstances often force you to "get your shit together." Specifically, having a spouse and kids to support provides an instant shot of maturity and focus for most (decent) people. That was certainly the case for me after having my first child at 26. Since more educated adults these days seem to be delaying marriage and children into their early thirties, it naturally follows that more twenty-somethings would lack the motivation to lead a more disciplined/career-minded lifestyle.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I moved from digg to reddit entirely because digg was blocked at work and reddit wasn't. I've worked at four different places in the last five years and at each one I expect to see reddit blocked as well, but no one has gotten around to it. Maybe my situation is atypical, but I have to believe that the lack of availability of digg to office-bound slackers had to have played some part in it's demise.
Making all programmers experts on accounting is a hopeless task. But what if we taught everyone (including the programmers) enough about accounting to understand why we would care that some of their time qualifies as "capitalizable" and some doesn't and what difference it makes? I think that basic level of understanding would be beneficial to everyone.
