1.3 Programming language

In this book, we will be using R. I teach courses in both R and python. Python is a more programmer-friendly language and because CUDA has a python interface, it is the go-to language for advanced machine learning packages (tensorflow, caffe2, etc). It might seem logical to use Python for this book. However, R was designed by statisticians and hence its tools are more suited to our particular purpose. Once you know one language, it is relatively easy to pick up others. While python may be better for programming, this book is about computational statistics and R is easier to work within this context.