---
title: Am(az|us)ingly Arrogant
author: Yihui Xie
date: '2017-09-04'
slug: arrogant
---

KDnuggets just published an article titled "[Python overtakes R, becomes the leader in Data Science, Machine Learning platforms](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/08/python-overtakes-r-leader-analytics-data-science.html)". I'm not going to comment on this article,[^1] but I noticed that one person made several comments under the article, and one of them was particularly amazing & amusing:

> [...] Go to to any major machine learning conference and see if anybody presents anything in R. Look into top arxiv.org papers for 2017 see if anybody posts code written in R. Go to any university and see if there any R courses being taught (hint: none). See if R research wins any awards (hint: 0). Organize a hackaphon on any topic and see if out of 100 teams anyone submits anything written in R. Look at Kaggle stats if any teams submit solutions in R. You will realize the ratio of python developers vs R developer is like 1000:1. Yea, R developers heroically are trying to fight back inevitable: introduce new cool packages dplyr, tidyr etc. But its lost cause.

Not even worth a rebuttal.

[^1]: Because it can easily lead to language wars, and language wars are generally a waste of time.
