Data science has become one of the most in-demand fields of the 21st century. As businesses generate vast amounts of data, they require skilled professionals to analyze this information and make data-driven decisions. One of the most important skills for data scientists is to master some programming language. The knowledge of a programming language for data science, enables professionals to write sophisticated data analysis programs beyond simple data querying, exploration, and visualization. While there are visual tools for exploring, accessing, curating, and analyzing datasets (e.g., spreadsheets and SQL tools), programming languages provide more versatility and enable more sophisticated analysis. Five of the most popular programming languages among the data science community are: Python, R, Julia, Java, and Scala. These languages have distinct features that make them popular choices for data science projects.
1. Python
The most popular language for data science, data engineering, data analytics and machine learning is Python. It is a versatile, open-source programming language that has recently become the go-to choice for most data scientists. Its user-friendly syntax, loose typing, extensive libraries, small learning curve, and active community make it an ideal choice for beginners and experienced professionals alike. With libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn, Python offers a wide array of tools for data manipulation, analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. An added bonus of the Python language is its integration with web development frameworks like Django and Flask, which allows data scientists to create data-driven web applications with ease.
2. R
For several years, R has been the de-facto programming language choice for data scientists. It is a very powerful programming language, which comes with an entire software environment that is designed for statistical computing and graphics. Developed in the early 1990s, R has become a popular choice among statisticians and data analysts. Its extensive collection of packages available through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) allows users to perform complex statistical analyses and create stunning visualizations with ease. R also offers a more domain-specific language for statistical modeling compared to Python, which makes it particularly attractive to researchers and academics. Nowadays, Python is more popular than R, yet there is still a very large based of legacy code written in R, including many models and algorithms.
3. Julia
Julia is a relatively new programming language. It was released in 2012 and specifically designed for high-performance numerical computing. It has gained popularity in the data science community due to its speed and ease of use. Julia’s syntax is quite similar to Python and MATLAB, which makes it approachable for those familiar with these languages. Additionally, Julia offers powerful parallel computing capabilities, making it an excellent choice for large-scale data processing tasks. This makes it appealing to developers that must product applications that scale in terms of the number of data processing jobs that they comprise. Julia’s ecosystem is not as extensive as Python’s. Nevertheless, its growing community and its effective packages (e.g., DataFrames.jl, Flux.jl) make Julia an exciting option to consider for data scientists.
4. Java
Java is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that has dominated the software development community for over two decades. It enables the development of a wide range of different application types, including both front end and back-end applications. Though not specifically designed for data science, it also provides libraries that enable data engineering, data processing and data analytics, which is the reason why it has been adopted by many data scientists as well. Its platform independence, scalability, and strong support for big data processing make it a popular choice for large-scale data analysis projects. Moreover, Java’s rich ecosystem of libraries, such as Hadoop, Spark, and TensorFlow, allows data scientists to work on various data science tasks like data processing, machine learning, and distributed computing. Java’s strong typing and performance make it suitable for large-scale, production-grade projects. Furthermore, it is an excellent choice for building data scalable data science systems that must integrate capabilities beyond data engineering and data analytics.
5. Scala
Scala is a programming language that combines the best of both object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. It is associated with the programming of popular Big Data frameworks (e.g., Spark), which is one of the reasons why it has become a popular choice for data science projects. Being the language of choice for Apache Spark, which is a powerful big data processing framework, it is particularly well-suited for distributed data processing. Scala’s concise syntax and interoperability with Java libraries make it an attractive option for data scientists familiar with Java. Additionally, Scala’s support for parallelism and immutability can lead to safer and more efficient code when working with large data sets.
Overall, choosing the right programming language for your data science project depends on your specific needs, background, and goals. Python and R offer extensive ecosystems and are excellent choices for beginners, while Julia, Java, and Scala provide unique advantages for large-scale data processing with high performance. In this context, Python and R are much well suited to fast prototyping and to the development of the data analytics parts of a data science project. On the other hand, Java and Scala are better choices when it comes to implementing sophisticated and scalable data intense systems that integrate with other modules. In several cases of non-trivial systems, data science languages and libraries must be integrated with modules written in other languages like C++ and javascript. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each language, you can make an informed decision about the best tool for your data science journey. Software developers and data scientists are therefore advised to keep an eye on the data science capabilities of programming languages.
