Sure, I used other languages – Javascript, Python, C and even C++ but I really liked PHP for there being so many libraries and it being so easy to tie into web apps.

Python was fine but it was something that I used when choices were limited – like for QGIS scripting and automation. Then over summer vacation I got that book out of the library about data science and discovered the benefits of an interactive intrepter with Jupyter. Python’s data frames model with pandas is quite powerful. I enjoy working with them. But I also found matplotlib, the graphing and mapping libraries for Python to be often lacking when trying to output quality, professional looking graphics.

I heard a lot of good things about R so I decided to take it up last autumn, and I haven’t looked back…

R has a werid syntax but the pipe model that can be used throughout is incredibly powerful and ggplot2 with only a little bit of tweaking makes amazing graphs and maps that look like they came out of a professional GIS program. Things I used to do in QGIS, I’m increasingly doing with the R programming language and I even converting a lot of my PHP and Python code now over to R. I am really hooked on this language after struggling with it a bit at first.