Forwarded message: > From [email protected] Fri Jun 5 15:32:00 2015 > From: "W. D. Allen" <[email protected]> > User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; > > Question; > > Can a *'GNUmeric spreadsheet + Python' * > configuration function equivalently to > '*R + any one of different spreadsheets'* > for doing Data Science statistics work?
Well the short answer is, "No.";-) For a more nuanced approach you might separate the programming language from the spreadsheet. For me the main advantage of Gnumeric is that some of its statistical routines are better than Excel, but AFAIK Gnumeric does not run Excel macros. Also, last I knew Gnumeric had been discontinued for Windows. In any case, I would see a spreadsheet as useful mainly as a data container and possibly for some very light data cleaning. They are also great for browsing data to get a feel for what sort of surprises are in there. I would not recommend doing serious statistics with any spreadsheet. R and Python are not entirely comparable. Python is a general purpose language and add-ins can extend its statistical capabilities to a point where it has about 0.037% of the power of R. But this may be all you need. If the task is mainly getting the data into usable form, after which only basic statistics will be applied to it, Python can be a good choice. R is a special purpose language for statistics. Where Python has a few addins for stats. R has thousands. R is an implementation of the S programming language from Bell Labs, also home of Unix and C. The Unix philosophy is specialized tools for each purpose that can be strung together in a chain to complete complex tasks. While R has been ported to other environments, it's not always a good fit if users are not thinking like Unix users. For example, Windows users may complain about R's limited data cleaning capabilities, while Unix users would just use standard Unix tools for that (AWK, Perl, Emacs, and maybe Python). These are my opinions. You may get others here;-) You can probably find extensive flame wars on the net for R vs. Python. -------> First-time AP Stats. teacher? Help is on the way! See http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html _ | | Robert W. Hayden | | 614 Nashua Street #119 / | Milford, New Hampshire 03055 USA | | | | email: bob@ the site below / x | website: http://statland.org | / '''''' _______________________________________________ gnumeric-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnumeric-list
