Python becoming language of choice for analytics professionals

New research shows that Python is gaining ground on business tools R and SAS as the language of choice for analytics professionals and data scientists.

Professionals have a growing range of options when choosing analytical tools, and the new survey of tool preferences reveals a roughly even split among the three leading programming languages.

Now in its fifth year, the annual survey of leading analytics tools, undertaken by executive recruiting firm Burtch Works, drew in responses from nearly 1,200 data scientists and analysts and despite new tools and technologies emerging in the analytics field, the major competition remains very much between R, Python, and SAS.

Python’s increasing popularity

The survey’s findings show the respondents were very evenly divided in their preferences for SAS (34%), R and Python (both 33%). However, in isolation, these figures don’t really do justice to the steady rise of Python, primarily at the expense of the R language. 

So, where has the growth in Python come from? Well, first and foremost, it’s seen to be a very strong language for machine learning, ideal for data visualisations and other statistical applications.

Shifts at the junior end can often give an indication of growing changes in the market, and the survey results confirm that the open source tools R and Python are overwhelmingly favoured by professionals with five or less years’ experience. The data also reveals that Python support among professionals in this category has doubled from 24% in 2016 to 48% in 2018. And whilst SAS continues to see strong support among professionals with 16 or more years’ experience, Python has also made noticeable gains here as well. 
“Python gained support in almost every category we examined this year and has especially taken hold at the early career level”, Burtch concluded.

In terms of sectors, Python support continues to be highest in Technology/Telecom area, while SAS remains strongest in industries like Financial Services and Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals. The survey results also highlight the falling use of R, from 50% in 2016 to below 40% this year. At the same time, the growth of Python has been significant – in 2016, it was standing at just 20% and this year it is hovering around the 50% mark.

Tellingly, other surveys, including the IEEE Spectrum 'The 2018 Top Programming Languages', have also ranked Python as the top data science programming language. Once again the decline in R has been cited as a major factor in the growing popularity of Python, with the IEEE report suggesting, “As the interest in large data sets has increasingly turned to their applications in machine learning, the existence of high-quality Python libraries for both statistics and machine learning may be making flexible Python a more attractive jumping-off point than the more specialised R.”

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The versatility and popularity of Python means that the demand for Python coding skills will certainly continue to grow, so the time may be right to consider one of our Python training courses.