Python

Python is an interpreted high-level general-purpose programming language. Python’s design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its notable use of significant indentation.

Not afraid to use Python 🐍

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Not afraid to use Python 🐍

I use R for a lot of projects as it has superior libraries for working with Census data, maps and spatial data. Tigris makes it easy to call and process all kinds of census lines.

But sometimes projects are best done in Python. I recently had a project where I needed run a regular expression to extract text from a PDF and put it in an excel file. Python was easy to do it in a few lines of code while I think it would have been harder to do in R.

I don’t really buy into all this doctoraire about you should use the same tool for every project. Use what makes sense, what you are best at, what executes quickly and produces the best results. 

MITO

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I am a bit under impressed by MITO. For one, it’s not open source software and only works in Jupyter lab and not Jupyter Notebook. Despite all the marketing and hype it’s not that much of an improvement of what you can do with a few simple lines of PANDAS code. Another thing I didn’t like was you had to manually add a cell below the MITO window to see the generated code.

One thing that I thought was nice was the PANDAS code it outputted was clean and easy to read. It’s a nice browser of data frames – reminded me of view in R. The extension is free to use both for personal and professional use, you just can’t redistribute it.