Three Languages for Data Science

This is a portion of a Northwestern University webinar from 2021.

See slides from the webinar, which was delivered September 29, 2021 as part of Northwestern University’s Thought Leadership Series. Or view the full webinar Putting Data Science into Practice.

The Northwestern University website provides additional information about the three languages for data science and their relationship to other computer languages. See Data Science and the Go Programming Language.

Python is sometimes described as a “glue language” because it is used for so many things. There are Python-based command-line tools and web applications. There are Python-based programs for basic statistics, analytics, and modeling. Python today is the most popular computer language and the most widely used client to deep learning platforms.

If Python is the glue, then Go is the superglue.

Backward compatibility is a key feature of Go, making the Go codebases easier to maintain over time. Donald Knuth had the right idea. When he got to version 3.14 of TeX, he declared that there would be no new versions of the language, no new features, only bug fixes. And with each bug fix, he would borrow another digit from π (pi). See Knuth’s original article: TUGboat, Volume 11 (1990) No. 4.

Northwestern’s Go course, initially entitled Data Engineering with Go, was introduced into the data science program during summer term, 2022. The current course title is Go and AI-Assisted Programming.

A detailed review of Northwestern’s data science curriculum and specializations is available on the MSDS program website.

Go to the blog page Tom Miller on Go and Data Science.

Go to Languages for Data Science.

Go to the home page Go and AI-Assisted Data Science.