<story><title>Python for Data Analysis (new O&apos;Reilly book from creator of Pandas)</title><url>http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cieplak</author><text>If you really want to crunch numbers, I highly recommend Haskell.  It falls short of Python in terms of libraries and by some accounts, readability, but it is substantially faster and excels at number crunching.  I find it easier to express number crunching in functional rather than object-oriented style programming.  Python has lambdas, but usually theres a more pythonic way to express something in Python.  Although I must say, I find Haskell&apos;s list comprehension syntax slightly more elegant.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tryhaskell.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tryhaskell.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit:  I take it back about Haskell&apos;s list comprehension syntax.  At the end of the day they&apos;re both great. Haskell&apos;s syntax just feels like reading set theory notation.</text></item><item><author>hkmurakami</author><text>As I get my feet wet again in programming, I&apos;ve gone through phases in dabbling with web, app, and game programming.&lt;p&gt;But about a month ago I realized, &quot;You know, what I really loved about my studies back in academic years was &lt;i&gt;numbers&lt;/i&gt;. That&apos;s what I want to do with code; &lt;i&gt;I want to crunch numbers&lt;/i&gt;&quot;&lt;p&gt;This realization made me switch over from learning Ruby to learning Python. This book is going to be &lt;i&gt;perfect&lt;/i&gt; for my interests.&lt;p&gt;Wes, thank you for your efforts in putting this book together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yummyfajitas</author><text>I&apos;m not sure I believe you that Haskell is faster than Python. In general, most of your python operations will be raw matrix operations handled by blas/lapack/etc.&lt;p&gt;While Python&apos;s functional programming constructs leave a lot to be desired, they are usually good enough for numerical work. Instead of using reduce(...) to sum an array and having it compile down properly, you can just use arr.sum(), which is implemented in C by numpy anyway.&lt;p&gt;I love Haskell (and want it to beat Python), but at this point, Python is the clear winner for numerical work. Libraries matter more than language in this case (as matlab demonstrates).</text></comment>
<story><title>Python for Data Analysis (new O&apos;Reilly book from creator of Pandas)</title><url>http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Cieplak</author><text>If you really want to crunch numbers, I highly recommend Haskell.  It falls short of Python in terms of libraries and by some accounts, readability, but it is substantially faster and excels at number crunching.  I find it easier to express number crunching in functional rather than object-oriented style programming.  Python has lambdas, but usually theres a more pythonic way to express something in Python.  Although I must say, I find Haskell&apos;s list comprehension syntax slightly more elegant.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tryhaskell.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://tryhaskell.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;edit:  I take it back about Haskell&apos;s list comprehension syntax.  At the end of the day they&apos;re both great. Haskell&apos;s syntax just feels like reading set theory notation.</text></item><item><author>hkmurakami</author><text>As I get my feet wet again in programming, I&apos;ve gone through phases in dabbling with web, app, and game programming.&lt;p&gt;But about a month ago I realized, &quot;You know, what I really loved about my studies back in academic years was &lt;i&gt;numbers&lt;/i&gt;. That&apos;s what I want to do with code; &lt;i&gt;I want to crunch numbers&lt;/i&gt;&quot;&lt;p&gt;This realization made me switch over from learning Ruby to learning Python. This book is going to be &lt;i&gt;perfect&lt;/i&gt; for my interests.&lt;p&gt;Wes, thank you for your efforts in putting this book together.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kfk</author><text>I never programmed in haskell, but I did in clojure and I must say that functional style and number crunching fit really nice. Said that, I am not sure you can beat things like numpy or pandas when it comes to complex/big datasets. I looked around in the haskell world and it seems that to do the same as, say, in pandas you need to write a lot of things yourself and you can&apos;t rely on the same superb documentation.&lt;p&gt;But I will be really happy to be proven wrong. I really think lots of things would be easier in Haskell.</text></comment>