Should I learn Python or Julia for 2020?

Anupama Singh
4 min readJan 9, 2020

It largely depends on the purpose you wish to learn the language for, Of the many use cases Python covers, data analytics has become perhaps the biggest and most significant. The Python ecosystem is loaded with libraries, tools, and applications that make the work of scientific computing and data analysis fast and convenient

Python is a general-purpose computing language that is easy to learn, and that has developed into a leading language for scientific computing. Some of the reasons Python may still be the better choice for data science work:

  • Julia arrays are 1-indexed. This might seem like an obscure issue, but it’s a potentially jarring one. In most languages, Python and C included, the first element of an array is accessed with a zero — e.g., string[0] in Python for the first character in a string. Julia uses 1 for the first element in an array. This isn’t an arbitrary decision; many other math and science applications, like Mathematica, use 1-indexing, and Julia is intended to appeal to that audience. It’s possible to support zero-indexing in Julia with an experimental feature, but 1-indexing by default may stand in the way of adoption by a more general-use audience with ingrained programming habits.
  • Julia is still young. The Julia language has been under development since 2009 and has undergone a fair amount of feature churn along the way. It still doesn’t have a 1.0 release, although the developers are getting close
  • Python has far more third-party packages. The breadth and usefulness of Python’s culture of third-party packages remain one of the language’s biggest attractions. Again, Julia’s relative newness means the culture of software around it is still small. Some of that is offset by the ability to use existing C and Python libraries, but Julia needs libraries of its own to thrive.
  • Python’s huge community is a huge advantage. A language is nothing without a large, devoted, and active community around it. Python enjoys just such a community right now. The community around Julia is enthusiastic and growing, but it is still only a fraction of the size of the Python community.

so if you wish to go with Big data then python is superb as Python is already been used for Big data management and Python is considered as one of the best data science tool for the big data job. Python and big data are the perfect fit when there is a need for integration between data analysis and web apps or statistical code with the production database. With its advanced library supports it helps to implement machine learning algorithms. Hence, in many big data aspects, Python and big data complement each other.

LEARNING PYTHON

There is no pre-requisite for learning Python. In fact, Python should be the first programming language to learn if you are a newbie because it is one of the easiest languages and you don’t have to memorize complex syntax. Just look at the following code.

  • print “Hello there!”

There cannot be a simpler code to print Hello there! and this is the reason you don’t require to know any other language. With Python as your first programming language, you can understand the concepts of programming more easily and can complete it in lesser time as compared to that taken in learning any other language.

  1. Your Stepping Stone
    Python can be your stepping stone into the programming universe. Employers are looking for fully stacked programmers and Python will help you get there. Python is an object-oriented language, just like Javascript, C++, C#, Perl, Ruby, and other key programming languages. For people planning to become software developers, learning this type of programming in one area will help you adapt easily in other environments.
  2. Powerful
    On the first point, I told it is as easy as everyday English but, it’s not also a kid toy. It is extremely powerful. That is why some of these companies use Python
  • Nasa (https://www.python.org/about/suc...)
  • Google
  • Yahoo Maps
  • Red Hat [The Red Hat Linux distribution uses Python for its installer (anaconda) and configuration utilities.]
  • IBM [IBM East Fishkill is using Python to create the business practice logic for factory tool control applications. These are used to control material entry, exit and data collection at the Micrus semiconductor plant in East Fishkill. Code that had been previously written in an internal, proprietary scripting language has been ported to Python.]
  • Even Quora
  • Dropbox
  • Youtube
  • Instagram using Python Django

You can learn Python from here FREE at Learn Python — Free Online Learning Course at Eduonix

OR

you can go on to learn more advance from here-

Learn Python programming from scratch

which provides the best courses for learning this language. The way and order in which the topics are explained in this site with a lot of examples are such that even the ones having no knowledge programming can easily learn from the site

hope it helped

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