DSC Weekly Digest 7 June 2021

Computer languages over the years tend to rise and fall in popularity, depending upon what the job market looks like, what's the hot technology du jour, and what needs it fulfills. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when Ruby on Rails was the must-have language out there, yet Ruby now seldom cracks the top 20 languages in most people's surveys. I can even remember a time when LISP was the dominant language in the artificial intelligence space, though you're more likely today to find LISP only as faint echoes in languages like Erlang and Clojure. If you look through older articles on DSC you'll find plenty of fodder about whether R or Python is the better language to learn, though by the numbers Python looks to be eclipsing R finally in the great language religious wars. However, the reality is that in the analytics space, your language choice is becoming less and less relevant.