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Comment by touchofevil | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't Python/Django make more sense in 2018 considering that Python could be used for data science and machine learning? I realize this is a Python vs Ruby question, but if you didn't know either Python or Ruby and were trying to pick between Django and Rails for a project, wouldn't you pick Django in 2018 due to future data science and machine learning opportunities?

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No. Learning Python is quick and simple compared to learning data science or machine learning.

Knowing Python and Django (which I do) does not afford you any ability do to those things.

Interesting. I assumed that spending more time working with Python would be beneficial, but I guess it's not a big deal. This is great to know, as I've been resistant to starting with Ruby/Rails for the reason I described. Thanks!

I don’t do machine learning or data science, so I’m assuming here, but I would imagine whatever you end up doing would be en entirely different service than your web stack and could be whatever language you wanted.

Learning Ruby would give you a big leg up over starting from scratch learning Python.

I don't know if you are familiar with any programming languages at all, but many skills translate cross-language...the paradigms are the same. Particularly with Ruby & Python which are very similar languages. They're good at the same things, by and large.

Taking your Ruby skills over to Python will be a matter of "google: [python thing] in ruby".

For a specific example, Python has a unique thing called "list comprehensions". Using that google string you can get some great ideas about replicating that functionality in Ruby.

Anyway, on a grander scale, picking up new languages is the easy part of programming--even when they're not so similar.

Best of luck!

Merely knowing python does not a data scientist make.

Of course, but wouldn't one be better preparing themselves for data science by working with python/django on a web app vs working with Ruby/Rails?

I think knowing python is just a small part. So yes, it would help, just not enough for it to matter (unless you know up front that you want to do these things).

Picking the basics or just enough python shouldn't take long(a couple of days?) for a intermediate programmer.

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