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Couple of notes.

Be prepared for most of your data scientist work to not be data science. Adjust your skillset for that.

Same in real science - for every minute you spend thinking about what nature might be doing, you spend tens of hours carrying things around, mixing things, checking things, repeating things, etc. This is how all real work is.

Most modern languages are procedural: Java, Python, Scala, R, Go, etc.

If someone has a friend who does Scala, can they read them this quote and film the reaction? Thanks.




Reading the quote in context:

> Isn’t SQL a programming language? It is, but it’s declarative. You specify the outputs you want (i.e. which columns from your table you want to pull), but not how those columns are actually returned to you. SQL abstracts a lot of what’s going on under the covers of a database.

You want a procedural language, one where you have to specify how and where the data is selected from. Most modern languages are procedural: Java, Python, Scala, R, Go, etc.

The author is trying to contrast fully Turing complete languages with a declarative domain specific language like SQL. (Yes, I know that some extensions provided by various database implementations make SQL Turing-complete.) Unfortunately, the word she chose to express this is already a term-of-art in the programming language world which means something different. Luckily, we're all charitable readers, so we can correct on the fly and understand what she meant.


Oh, absolutely, the meaning is perfectly clear! I just want to see a Scala programmer cry.




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